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RMCAD Archives - Krister Eide Art

Mar 09
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I’m Accepted to the Comics, Anime, and Fantasy Exhibition in Laguna Beach!

By | art school, Children's book illustration, Cute Animals | No Comments

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I just heard the great news that my Squid Attack on the Nautilus got accepted to the Comics, Anime, Cartoons, and Fantasy Exhibition at the Las Lagunas Gallery Laguna Beach California! This is the first time I’ll be showing and selling my work in a international curated / juried exhibition. Pretty cool.

My family’s been saving up frequent flier miles, so I’ll even be able to attend the Artists’ Reception on April 5th. The exhibition will be open from April 5-27th. The opening also takes place on Laguna Beach’s First Thursday Artwalk. Say hello if you can make it!

Dec 06
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Twenty Thousand Leagues Book Cover

By | Animals, art school, Children's book illustration, Cute Animals, Fantasy, Illustration, Jules Verne, kids lit art, Painting, RMCAD, SCBWI | No Comments

Eide-Twenty-Thousand-Leagues-dec3I just turned in this illustration last week for Illustrating Literature class. It  continues some ideas I have about Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea with Animals. I learned a lot more about painting water, textures, and lighting on this one and this week I’m working on more sequential illustrations from the story.

It’s been so busy, I haven’t had a chance to post to the blog, but I had an incredible time at #CTNexpo2017. I’ll have to follow up in other posts, but one of the sessions I went to was on publishing. Many of the artists at this expo were involved at least some point in huge animations studios like Disney, Dreamworks, Pixar, Blue Sky. Greg Manchess and Armand Baltzar talked about how they had a dream of getting their artwork and stories into book form, although they didn’t clearly fit into either picture books or graphic novels. The result is Greg’s Above the Timberline and Armand’s Timeless.

Here’s an example from Greg’s book. The inset is a personalized inscription he gave me.

manchess

Here’s an example from Armand’s book:

armand

Sep 08
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Sequential Art – Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

By | Animals, art school, birds, Children's book illustration, Cute Animals, Fantasy, Illustration, kids lit art | 3 Comments

I just had my first week of Children’s Book Illustration 1 at RMCAD and the first assignment was to develop a few several concept sketch comics in 3 panels on the theme of: Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

It was a nice first assignment to ease into thinking about sketching from a visual storytelling perspective vs. drawing single sketches.

 

The last one was probably my favorite. This week we’re drawing a mini book dummy for an Aesop’s fable.

Last night, we also had our opening of the Fantastical Worlds Art Show at Blakely Hall in  Issaquah Highlands. It was exciting to have my 20,000 Leagues with Rabbits and Outside Looking In works hanging along the others! The show will be up for the next two months. Drop by if you have a chance!  It was nice to see other members of Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrations – Western Washington there, too.

Sep 01
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I Won a Charlene Cosgrove Memorial Scholarship !

By | Animals, Children's book illustration, gouache, Illustration, Painting, RMCAD, watercolor | 2 Comments

I just found out today that I won a Charlene Cosgrove Memorial Scholarship at my university, Rocky Mountain College of Art + Design!  It was very unexpected.  It’s $825 that I can put toward tuition.

I submitted this painting a marbled murrelet (it’s actually still a WIP – some things I need to clean up) done in gouche and transparent watercolor and the crow that I recently posted here on the blog and Gerda from the Snow Queen (below).

There was also a writing prompt with the scholarship and I had a chance to write on a Japanese artist Tabaimo who recently had an exhibition at the Asian Art Museum here in Seattle.

The question we were to write about was whether we thought the context of the artist was important for a full appreciation and understanding of art. For me, the context of the art is very important.

I’ll post my paper below for anyone who might be interested. Also here’s a short video interview with Tabaimo talking about the exhibition.

 

Scholarship paper here.

Jul 25
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Smiling Crow and Wildlife Rehabilitation

By | Animals, birds, Cute Animals, Illustration, RMCAD, SCBWI | No Comments

Smiling-crow-crop

 

Here’s a great commission that I had a chance to draw, a smiling crow. I haven’t had a chance to post, but now I’m taking Non-Western Art History. It’s passing pretty quickly (Haiti, India, China, Japan so far), but it’s been interesting.

At the beginning of summer, I also had a chance to start working in a small wildlife rehabilitation center. It’s been a great experience so far – mostly birds and small mammals. Here are two long-time residents, Hooligan and Eclipse  – both barred owls who aren’t able to be released because they have one wing. They are beautiful. It’s Hooligan who likes to talk.

[wpvideo R08eVJEd]
May 15
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Sketching Bears, Wolves, and Dogs

By | Animals, art school, Children's book illustration, Cute Animals, digital, Drawing, Illustration | No Comments

This week’s assignment are gestures of bears, wolves, and dogs. Using a envelope for the animals and simplifying geometric shapes helps with simplifying. The class is setting into a routine of drawing gestures with a little value added in some, skeleton and ecorche version, and discussion post which looks at different rendering of animals characters and how they can be portrayed as protagonists or antagonists in a story. It’s fun seeing the examples that my classmates come up with.

I’m finding I really like drawing with the Procreate app on the iPad pro and Apple pencil. It’s close to drawing with a real pencil. When I want this soft effect with pencil, I usually prefer to use mylar (Dura-lar) which comes in huge rolls from Dick Blick and erases cleanly.

bearslittle-polar-bearwolves

labrador-1labrador-2labrador-3

My discussion post:
There’s some amount of range when it comes to how sympathetically bear characters are portrayed. On the sympathetic side, there are characters such as teddy bears, and related characters such as the Care Bears and Winnie the Pooh, which are modeled more on the stuffed animal than the actual animal.

poohlitte-bear

More realistic sympathetic bears include Baloo from any of the multiple adaptations of The Jungle Book, Smokey the Bear, and the bear family of Maurice Sendak’s Little Bear.

On the more antipathetic side, there are characters such as the bear in the film version of The Fox and the Hound, and the grizzly bear from the film Balto, which are portrayed as bestial, inhuman predators.

When wolves are portrayed positively, they tend to come off as majestic, intelligent, loyal, embodying the nobility of nature; the wolf family in The Jungle Book, Moro in Princess Mononoke.

wolf-3

 

Negatively, wolves are portrayed as crafty predators, as with the classical fairytale archetype of the Big Bad Wolf.

 

 

wolf-4The main example I can think of when it comes to neutral/background characters is how, in Donald Duck etc. comics, otherwise “human” side/background characters tend to be given dog noses, and occasionally ears. Here, the use of animal characteristics basically just signifies that these stories take place in a completely unreal fantasy world.
In general, I would say that completely realistic renderings of animals, as you might find in an educational book, often have less strong emotional expressivity, and are less immediately emotionally accessible as a result. Even mostly realistic designs often “cheat” when it comes to faces, adding human elements such as humanoid scleras, eyebrow muscles, and mouth expressions.

May 08
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Big Cats – Animal Anatomy and Drawing

By | Animals, digital, Drawing, Graphite, Illustration, RMCAD | No Comments

I had my first week of Animal Anatomy and Drawing and the assignments were all on Big Cats. Last week I also had a chance to go to Cougar Mountain, a small zoo in Issaquah. We shot some nice photo reference, though.

The first assignment was to break down the animals into 3D geometric shapes. It was a bit hard at first, but I can see that it helps simplify and visualizes the 3D forms when you see them in the live animals. The idea of drawing the envelope is to get the general shape of the animal or figure before working on details. Here are some of my gesture drawings. For me, it’s easier working out the forms when watching a video loop of animals moving. The book for the course is Joe Weatherly’s Drawing Animals. We also had to do skeleton and ecorche versions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Apr 14
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Vertigo Documentary for Film Studies at RMCAD

By | Film | No Comments

This is a little different from my art and illustration work (I’ll let you know how the SCBWI Conference went in a future post), but I took a Film elective this quarter and in addition to analyzing films, we had to make a short documentary-style film based on one of the AFI’s top 100 films. It had to include at least 5 interviews (friends and family ok) and address whether the film was relevant to audiences today. I picked the great Hitchcock film Vertigo.

I’m grateful to  author (Auralia Thread series) and film critic Jeffrey Overstreet and attorney and film lecturer Robert Cumbow, and also my parents and grandmother Brock, Fernette, and Ruth Eide who allowed me to interview them for this film.

 

If you’d like to watch the my full uncut interviews with Jeffrey Overstreet and Robert Cumbow, see them below.  I’m also grateful to the Dusten Kaspar and Seattle Film Festival for letting me film some of the opening moments of their 6-hour Cinema Dissection of Vertigo.

 

 

Dec 19
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Still Life – Otis in His Study

By | acrylic, Animals, birds, Children, Children's book illustration, kids lit art, Painting, RMCAD, SCBWI | 2 Comments

Here’s my final project for Still Life Painting. It was a great fun. The assignment was to create a composition that included ceramic, glass, and metal. I included Otis, who  is a bird that I grew up with on our front table. He was molded by talented ceramicist Stephani Stephenson of Revival Arts Studio (her Facebook page is here). It was nice to be in touch with her after all these years.

From Otis, I learned a lot more about handling acrylic. For this piece, I used Ampersand Aquabord, Golden Acrylic, and Holbein Fluid Acrylic.

I’m also excited to share that I sold my first work through my website (thanks Garret!) and two additional works through the Gage Small Works show.

otis-step-1otis-step-2 otis-step3

Oct 07
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Process Illustration – Dabbling in Ink

By | Illustration, ink | No Comments

This week’s assignment for Conceptual Illustration is to take media that you’ve had no experience with and then group them into 2 or 3 themes.

I really liked the Waterman’s Serenity Blue ink. The others are Winsor Newton.

I initially started with the idea of Copic markers and ink washes, but I found that I preferred the unexpected results of ink washes and the fractal patterns that they made as they got absorbed into paper to Copics, which were a more controlled medium.

Some of the random washes I’ll be working on this week are posted below. This week’s assignment  for RMCAD is with abstract sources of inspiration for illustration. Next week, will be with concrete discoveries. It should be fun.

This week I’ll be illustrating with the Guild of Natural Science Illustration Northwest at the Burke Museum. I also got some nice news that Pilchuck Audubon is interested in having me illustrate some work for their educational program.