"Death Of A Novelist"

Here are the full-page illustration and accompanying 1/4 page spot illustration that I did for Robert Gover's short story "One Novel's Tortured Sojourn through The Culture War and Copyright Legalities" (what a mouthful!). I enjoyed doing these because, for the first time in quite a while, I got to experiment doing an illustration free of people! It's been a while! I am pleased with where they ended up. I might tweak them a bit before handing them in Monday, but otherwise, I'd say they're pretty much where they'll stay! Enjoy!

XO Meg

and on to the next one...

Seems like there's no shortage of projects, eh? Now I'm working on another editorial piece for Heidi Younger's Illustration Workshop class. This one deals with copyright infringement and loss of work. I'm enjoying the simplicity of this one -- I don't usually do illustrations without figures/animals of some sort, so focusing on an object for once is a lot of fun! It was particularly difficult to obtain reference, have you ever tried to cut a shape out of a book before?! Utterly exhausting! (Sorry Dean Koontz...)

Here's the progress so far! It's actually about halfway there. I'll be sure to post again when it's all finished!

XO Meg

"Requiem Mass"

I finally finished up "Requiem Mass" for Andrew McCarthy's short story "Going Back In", featured in the National Geographic Adventure Aug/Sep 2009 issue. It was an editorial assignment given to my Mentor/Specialization class by our professor Richard Elmer. Done in Adobe Photoshop, and I'm quite pleased with the final result... I don't know if I've ever done such a really complete looking finish! I'm experimenting with digital finishes a lot lately and I'm very excited about this new direction I'm headed in.

The idea is that  the girl, Katy, has drowned and you are seeing the reactions of her peers reflected in the water. I wanted the focus to be on Katy and set the mood with a split-complementary color scheme. And now... back to work!

XO Meg

Dirty Drowning Man

Here's a sample shot of progress of my first finish of this semester for Richard Elmer's mentor/specialization class. We had to do an editorial piece from a story about camping and a girl who drowns and this dude's road to redemption. I drew a drowning girl and listened to a lot of Primus...

I'm doing this piece digitally, as it is now my fastest and most proficient form of color rendering. I'm really excited about where this is heading - I've decided to meld together flat shape and full render and linework. I want to maintain the freshness of my original drawings and still keep a strokey, brushy, painterly atmosphere. I'm stoked to see where this new direction leads me!! I'll post the full finish by Weds (because that's when it's due... heh, heh...)

XO Meg