RMCAD Archives - Krister Eide Art

Mar 09

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

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

I 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.

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 Krister Eide Art 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 Krister Eide Art 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 Krister Eide Art Animals, birds, Cute Animals, Illustration, RMCAD, SCBWI No Comments

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 Krister Eide Art 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.

bears wolves

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.

pooh

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-4 The 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 Krister Eide Art 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 Krister Eide Art 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 Krister Eide Art 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.

Oct 07

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Process Illustration – Dabbling in Ink

By Krister Eide Art 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.

Aug 23

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Changing Reality – Life Drawing

By Krister Eide Art art school, Children, Children's book illustration, Color, figure, gouache, Illustration, Mixed Media, Painting, Pastels, People, Reference, Technique, watercolor 3 Comments

We had an interesting discussion this past week about realistic (or hyper-realistic) painting vs. realistic
painting with fantastic elements. A fellow student shared some of the hyper-realistic paintings of Charles Jeong from South Korea. I shared Allen Williams’ If Beauty Were a Book, done in graphite.

I realized while I like representational art, I prefer works that convey emotion or story more than complete accuracy.

In our final assignment of the class (costume figure), I decided to change it up a bit and use color and value changes, and even changes in the model to alter the mood.

It great to get back painting again. I combined a gouache underpainting with transparent watercolor and then Faber Castell Polychromos pencils and little touches of Sennelier pastels for highlights. It was nice to see that all of the media seemed to work together.

Had a great time with the critique group through SCBWI last weekend. Now I have a week off before starting Concept Illustration.

Aug 15

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More Pastels – Carbothello Stabilo Pencils

By Krister Eide Art Animals, art school, artists groups, charcoal, Children, Children's book illustration, Drawing, Illustration, Mixed Media, Painting, Pastels, Portraits, RMCAD, SCBWI, Technique 2 Comments

It’s been another busy week, but learning a lot more what CarbOthello pencils can do. I really like the medium although I have a lot to learn about making color blends. This past week had our usual gesture drawings, 2 hand drawings in pastel, and then a costumed figure drawing. Sanded paper like UArt or Wallis can receive more layers than Canson Mi-Teintes or other pastel papers, but they will eat up your pencils quicker.

I found I like the soft rich blacks of Nitram charcoal. It also doesn’t have as much dust as General’s.

I’ll also post the three examples of pastel paintings that I posted in this week’s discussion. Pastel offers such a wide variety of expression. I really like the medium.

The first is a rendering of Ophelia from Cuong Nguyen who worked as a successful web designer for many years until he got working more as a streetchalk artist, then became a full-time fine art painter. I learned from him that skin tones can be mixed with a green underpainting (verdaccio) and flesh tones.

The second is an illustration from Paul Howard from a Jill Tomlinson book called The Owl who was afraid of the dark. I like the soft luminous quality Howard was able to get from his use of pastels.

Finally, there’s The Guardian by Fiona Tang. It combines chalk pastel with charcoal and acrylic on a paper backing. The different textures of the various media used for this piece this piece contribute to the overall effect in different ways; the chalk pastel in particular is important to the trompe l’oeil effect, helping to differentiate the “three-dimensional” stag in the front from the more “two-dimensional” background charcoal elements, with the white tone of the pastel “light” against the natural brown color of the paper.

This coming week is my final one for Life Drawing IV. We’ve got a watercolor assignment, the first I’ve had since I’ve been in art school. Also this weekend, I’ll be going to the Great Critique-nic through the Western Washington Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators. It’ll be the first one that I’ve ever gone to. People bring their illustrations or writing and split up into small groups where they critique and be critiqued.

Aug 08

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Drawing Hands – Life Drawing IV

By Krister Eide Art art school, charcoal, Children's book illustration, Color, Drawing, figure, Illustration, Painting, RMCAD, Technique No Comments

This past week my class has been looking at the drawing of expressive hands. We’re still working for the most part in charcoal which is getting easier to handle for me. I like Strathmore Toned Paper and I’m finding it easier to get darker tones with a softer Nitram charcoal. I had started with Strathmore 500 charcoal, but it doesn’t have the smooth look of toned paper.

Besides drawing practice (whole body gestures) and these hand drawings, we also have a discussion post where we post examples of expressive hands. Everyone always shares very different examples – it’s a great part of the class.

The three I shaerd this past week were from Rackham, Wyeth, and Earl Oliver Hurst. In the Rackham, I thought it was an interesting contrast between the knobby hands of the old woman and the simple open hands of the children. The Wyeth also showcases contrasts in this Heidi picture. The grandfather is tanned and has a commanding gesture. It’s contrasted with Heidi’s fairer and more tentative post. The Hurst I liked because he seemed to contrast the confident face of the man with the nervous lines in his jacket and hands.

Jul 22

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Life Drawing – Simplifying Using Geometry

By Krister Eide Art art school, charcoal, Drawing, figure, Illustration, RMCAD, Technique No Comments

Interesting work in Life Drawing class the past week. We’re learning how to simplify figures by blocking in simple geometric shapes. It helps generalize what you’re seeing and I think will make it easier working from life.

At the Terryl Whitlach conference, she had recommended Future Publications’ How to Paint and Draw Anatomy which showed how to break the human figure into simpler shapes. I found the book (actually both volumes) online at Scribd.

Today, my teacher also shared a video that will make really help what I want to be able to do. The figures are very fluid, but also have volume.

Jul 10

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Coloring Drawings and More from the SCBWI Exhibit in Seattle

By Krister Eide Art Animals, art school, Children, Children's book illustration, Color, digital, Drawing, Illustration, Mixed Media, SCBWI No Comments

I’m experimenting more with different ways to color drawings. The IpadPro, Apple Pencil, and the $5.99 app Procreate make the process more like traditional painting.

At left is my original homework assignment Mastering the Pencil.

By printing, I can also use traditional media like watercolor and pastel and not have to worry about destroying the original.

I also wanted to post some of the beautiful work at the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators exhibit that’s open at the Washington State Convention Center until September.

The artists are, respectively, Kelly Patton, Jessixa Bagley, and Hannah Stephens.

Jul 01

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More Drawing

By Krister Eide Art Animals, art school, birds, Children's book illustration, Drawing, GNSI, Graphite, Illustration, SCBWI No Comments

I dropped my Hornblower in the Crisis of at the Washington State Convention Center on Wednesday and got a sneak peek at other work that will be on display from the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators now until September 30th. It’s a fantastic show and I’m honored to have work in it. We’re going to go down tomorrow with our family and my grandparents and take it all it. There’s also a Meet the Illustrators and Family Draw Along September 17th which I know will be great.

Art History III is over for me now and it’s nice to get more drawing together. The past week I’ve been trying out new methods of adding color to my pencil drawings. This crow (we like crows in house) was based on an old photo of Fred Astaire.

I’m trying watercolor, colored pencil, and pastel over printed versions from the Artisan 1430 printer.

My new course this quarter is Life Drawing IV. It feels good to be working in traditional media again. I’m also started working with charcoal powder for the first time. It’s messy, but I really like what can be done with a light touch. I’m also seeing what a difference it makes using a fine grade of charcoal paper.

Here’s a skull that was this week’s homework. This holiday weekend I’m going to be traveling down to Monterey for the annual meeting of the Guild of Natural Science Illustrators. Looking forward to it! It’ll be my first art conference. Jack Laws is one of the keynotes. I admire both of their work.

Apr 23

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Owl and Frog Ink Illustration

By Krister Eide Art Animals, art school, birds, Composition, Graphite, Illustration, RMCAD No Comments

Just finished this – it’s my last week in Basic Illustration. It’s been a great class. It’s been a learning curve going to ink from pencil. The assignment was to choose a fortune cookie fortune and make a drawing from it. My fortune was “You are wise to keep your eyes open at all times.”

We weren’t allowed to use ink washes so it was a change for me as I had to focus on line art.

The ink drawing was first done in pencil then inked using micron pens, a Lamy fountain pen, and a little Copic marker for blocking in the grass. I also use Duralar mylar which helped a lot with my learning curve for ink. Duralar is very forgiving with ink – because it erases cleanly with alcohol or the colorless Copic marker blender.

My pencil draft is below.

Apr 06

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Bunny Deep Sea Explorer and Jules Verne

By Krister Eide Art Animals, Children, Children's book illustration, Fantasy, Graphite, Illustration No Comments

Here’s my pencil illustration for the the thumbnail I previously uploaded. I went with the underwater city. I took some of my inspiration loosely from those great Jules Verne books, 20,000 Leagues under the Sea, and all the vintage diver stories. I’ll also post my inked / copic tone marker version at the bottom. Ink and copic markers are new media for me. I also am working on Mylar / Dura-lar, which is helpful for making frequent revisions, especially with ink.

Mar 04

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Ecorche Final

By Krister Eide Art art school, Drawing, figure, Illustration, People, RMCAD No Comments

Here’s my Ecorche final for Life Drawing III. It was challenging to work from a photograph and then imagine all the muscles underneath.

I found it helpful working with an Ecorche app on my iPad. Another helpful app is Skelly for skeletal work. If you frequently rotate the model in the app it helps get a 3D sense of where the muscles are in space.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yipZDR8pF70&w=560&h=315%5D

Feb 22

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Life Drawing – Ecorche

By Krister Eide Art artists groups, Drawing, Graphite, Illustration, People, RMCAD No Comments

I’m nearing the end of Life Drawing III and it’s been a great quarter, but it’s still hard to find enough time to paint. We’re working on more complex figures and also doing some ecorche drawings (they show muscles without skin) in more dynamic poses.

Yesterday I also went to my first meeting of the Puget Sound Group of Northwest Artists. It’s one of the oldest art associations in the United States. It’s an accomplished group and we learned a lot. The guest speaker is David Gray whose painting work I admire. He was very down to earth and very generous with sharing techniques and practical tips. I’ll embed a video of him painting a self-portrait. For now, I am focusing on watermedia, but I’d like explore oil. PSGart meets monthly in Kirkland.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFbyUfLNfJw%5D

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