May ✿❀Secret Sketches❀✿ Batch #1

Hello and welcome to you, and welcome to the month of May. Here's a song for you to enjoy today, it's called Komorebi which means sunlight filtering through the trees, making dappled lighting. The weather here is warm enough that I can bring my laptop outside and into the shade to write this up! It's about time we go on a hike or outdoor escapade sometime soon, right? It's definitely in my plans to film a mountain vlog.

My life has been 50% Arden High: King Cheer, 25% tattooing, and 25% just enjoying myself/figuring life out. I think that's pretty well reflected in today's little batch of secret sketch content. King Cheer is in full swing as I mentioned in a previous post, so much of my ipad screen time is spent on that--this is usually when my personal work takes a back seat so I can expend energy on my work! I don't mind this though, I feel really excited to be working on a big project again and I love the story/characters/script so much, that it doesn't always feel like work. 

Image 1: Custom tattoo designs for some folks including my mom, who I'll be giving the bee to on Mother's Day! :-D The slavic mermaid has been put on the backburner for a while seeing as my client had to reschedule. The mushroom and garden tiger moth were designed to be done together, but the client decided that they would just get the garden tiger moth to start, and they asked me to fill in the thorax.

Image 2: My daily hobonichi drawings for this month. I really fell behind admittedly on....most days, and I would end up drawing 3 or 4 days at a time. This month I'm going to try to keep up with it every day, because that was my original goal!

Image 3: Not much to look at, but I was playing with some colors I saw in an advertisement on pinterest in Looom. I'll get back to drawing in this document with these colors eventually! 

Image 4: Doodles from when I was procrastinating my real work but I called it a "warm-up"...featuring 💖💘💕 Ed and Stede 💖💘💕

Images 5-8: Whole-ass sketch pages of King Cheer because I couldn't bear to crop them! I feel so much more comfortable with paneling thanks to my practice with Book 1. I can officially say now that I've got one graphic novel under my belt, I've gone from rookie to veteran (barely hahaha)!! Anyways these characters are a lot of fun and it's definitely a challenge trying to fit so much content in (this is one of Shakespeare's longest plays) but it allows for a lot more in-depth exploration and storytelling. 

Image 9: For these last two images, we take a trip down memory lane. This "yard sale" sign was one of the first projects I did on my ipad, back when I was still getting comfortable with it! It was an art test for an ad agency in the Greenville area. It should be noted that a graphic designer beat me out for the internship spot....fair, but they actually offered me a position as their next-season's-intern and I declined it. I won't go into the details, but the jist is that I don't think I would have been very happy and would have been making much money. I do think about possibly pursuing ad work again, especially illustrative packaging design and branding, but I'm just so happy I ended up doing what I do now. :'-)

Image 10: Finally, not really an individual secret sketch but a screenshot of one of my folders that held my Ringling senior thesis work. I have so much love for this thesis and the research/work that went into it. The whole thing can be seen here. I have a youtube video  of me painting a page (that is awkwardly narrated, I believe I recorded it with my mom's airpod microphone in my childhood bedroom after being sent home for covid in my last month of college in April 2020). If you don't already know, all the illustrations for my thesis were painted traditionally, and then I scanned them in and laid them out to make a book, with digital touch-ups, along with some photography and costume design! 

I wanted to include these last two images even though they're from years ago. Both date back to Spring of 2020, which was an extremely formative time in my professional life. This was when I was panicking about getting a job, what I wanted to do, feeling so much going on in my heart and my brain, and then covid hitting like a ton of bricks, shattering a lot of hope that I had previously had. Job interviews that seemed promising were falling through, I didn't get to show my senior thesis formally, I didn't have a graduation ceremony, I was moving to a new city without knowing anyone in a pandemic. 

I like to look back on work from this time, because even if it was a scary time, it meant so much to me. A lot of growth happened in that time!

Hope you enjoyed this little batch of sketches. I'll send some love into the universe for you today, and I'll see you very soon.

-JG