New "Fasion by Elora"... Trendy Sasha McLane! This is the most fun I've had drawing in a long time :) I'm using this book to experiment with different styles... so excited to do the rest!

Fasions by Elora

A while ago my dad gave me a bunch of my old drawings, including this hilarious fashion series I did in 1998, when I was 9 years old. I'm an only child so it was pretty lonely growing up and I had an imaginary friend named Sasha (spelled "Shasha" by my 9 year old self... the H is silent) who was very fashionable apparently xD

I'm tabling at CTN for the first time this year with my buddy Christina Cornett, and I thought it would be a fun idea to make a sketchbook of 2015 redraws of these. This is the first one, and a preview of what's to come! I'm pretty excited about these "Fasions by Elora" ...In all its misspelled glory smile emoticon I hope my 9 year old self would be proud of me!

Sketch Dump!

Considering it's almost the end of the year, I think I should probably post some of these drawings from a couple months ago that I never posted on here :\ Sketch dump! WOOHOO!

The sketches at the very top are early concepts of my character Elodie from the comic I'm working on called Graveyard Shift. The guy under those sketches is her male counterpart. He's supposed to start off fat and lose weight over the course of the comic, which is kinda challenging in terms of character design, to keep him looking the same after the weight loss. 

There are also some Charlie Day sketches in here from when I was high off Pacific Rim :D I just love Charlie Day to death... I really need to do some It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia fanart. That is LONG overdue.

Goodbye World, I'm Focusing on Foundation!

I haven't been posting on here lately, but I HAVE been posting on Tumblr. Why? Because I've decided to stop EVERYTHING and focus only on foundation. I realize I've been getting really frustrated and depressed lately because I KNOW that I am seriously lacking in so many aspects of artistic skill. Whenever I try to draw something that's out of my comfort zone, my body just automatically draws a girl. And I hate that. I don't wanna just draw GIRLS the rest of my life...I wanna be able to draw EVERYTHING!

So my bf, tired of all my whining, decided to force me to do this foundation that I've been saying I would focus on for like a year already. He came up with this curriculum and created a schedule for us every day, so we basically have a self study class from 9pm-midnight on weekdays, and on weekends we do field sketching for homework. On Fridays we have at least 3 spreads due for studio sketchbook of whatever we want, and homework is due a week from the day we have our class. Each day is different, Mondays and Wednesdays are dedicated to anatomy, Tuesdays is for design sketching, Thursdays is for visual communication which, in this case refers to lighting and shading, and Fridays is perspective.

I've basically shut myself off from the world and all social media except for the tumblrs that I post this stuff on. This seems extreme but I know this is what I need to get my shit together and finally feel good about myself and being productive. I'm not sure WHEN I'll be ready to return to society, but when I do I hope I'll finally be able to believe in myself. That's the ultimate goal here, because I am always the one holding me back and I'm sick of it.

ANYWAY. If you are at all interested in this, you can check out our "School" tumblr to see both of our work at letsimprove.tumblr.com, or you can follow MY journey at sketchercises.tumblr.com (I reblog to the school from this because I actually post more of my own exercises on here), and you can also follow my main tumblr which I'll be posting more refined work when I get to it.

The stuff I posted are SOME of the things I've been working on :) Go follow me on tumblr! It'll be a while before I post here again, but trust me...I am working my ass off.

SketchDaily 3: Expressions

WIP! The SketchDaily for today was to fill out the 25 Essential Expressions sheet. I'm super exhausted because I took a 5 hour nap yesterday, woke up at 10:30pm, and now it's 6pm the next day and I haven't slept...so I don't think I'll get to finish the 25 expressions :( Gonna take a nap! It's SO nice though to revisit my girl Magic Macie who I designed 2ish years ago for Shiyoons character class. She's still my favorite character I've come up with :D I really need to do something with her already...

Willa Character Sheet

I was kinda in a bad place last night… I wasn’t having fun drawing Willa at all and she’s the main character of this story I’m working on! So yeah… was kinda depressing. I drew her like a bajillion times and she just had no life to her… but then today I got the “Art of Wreck-It Ralph” book and boy was that an inspiration :) Before I was so focused on keeping her simple that she was all stiff, but after I started loosening up, she started to have some personality. I still have a bajillion more drawings to do of her before I’m comfortable, but I think I’m finally heading in the right direction maybe~

Willa Color Attempts

Soooo this proves that I'm just now learning how to color. It's pretty frustrating. Apparently I didn't know anything about values before yesterday. Here's my progression from that first attempt... Doing it in black and white first REALLLLYYY helped. I need a lot of practice. But that's what this blog is for right??? To show progress! :D Let's hope I get better soon.

Sketching for Animators and Illustrators Midterm

So this is the first time I've combined my inspiration in the same area as my drawings... and it actually looks pretty cool :) It's nice to see it all together! It's kinda big so it'll probably be impossible to see anything unless it's opened in a new window or tab... haha :\

Oh man... this is gonna be a huge project. I'm so excited!!! :D

Willa and Fritz

Alrighty...I might finally be starting to like them :)

More Willa

I think I'm getting closer, but she's still not totally locked down. Her body looks too flat... gotta find a way to remedy this and make her volumes apparent.

Fritz & Willa Concepts

My midterm for Sketching for Animators and Illustrators is on Saturday, and I'm feverishly trying to get my main characters locked down. I posted some Willa before, and now I finally have some stuff on the main guy, Fritz.

Here are the more developed Fritz sketches. I like the way this is going :) If only I could get Willa to such a state... blah. I'm hoping I can find her soon!

And here are some of the scribbles it took to get there. Process process process! 

Here's an attempt at Willa... but it's pretty weak compared to Fritz. ARGH!

I still don't like where this is going. I think I'll give her long hair.

'Alienated' Character Exploration: Willa

Soooo I'm taking Marshall Vandruff's Sketching for Animators and Illustrators class at Fullerton College right now, and the cool thing about it is that we get to design our own project... so it's basically like independent study :) Awesome. Therefore I'm taking this opportunity to FINALLY create a short film. My midterm is next week and we have to show a pre-production presentation board, so I'm kinda freaking out since I wanna have as much material as possible for it. For my final I'm planning on doing storyboards and hopefully an animatic for the film I wanna animate early next year... never done that before so I'm preeettttyyy excited :D Just wish I had more time to work on this stuff. Ugh.

Anyway. Here are some early character explorations of the female lead, Willa. I'm still trying to figure her out, so it's a lotta scribbly diarrhea, but I figure I'd post it anyway.

Some Girl

Some sketches from a story that I'm putting on hold for a while. 

Scrooge Final For David Colman's Character Design Class

So, when people see this, they usually say something like "Wha? Scrooge is a woman? What is this?" and yes. For our redesign project, David made us design Scrooge as a woman, and one of the ghosts as an animal. Anyway!

I still have a lot to do for this project... I really fell in love with it after really thinking about the story :) You can really change it a lot, just thinking about the premise of Scrooge as a female. Women deal with many different things, especially emotional things. I had a lot of fun coming up with a story I could relate to more. You know, as a woman. 

I definitely plan on going back and refining these, designing the whole cast and adding color. I'm just posting this because it's my presentation for class tonight. I didn't finish nearly as much as I wanted to finish, but boy did I learn a lot about the character design process. That's the most valuable thing :) I think this class made me realize everything I still have to learn to be adequate... so I'm going to go into MAJOR study mode now. 

Especially because I just quit my job :D (Last day was August 10! WHOA!) Time to chase those dreams, Elora! :)