Waking up in Art school: MAC Comic Camp

Today, I want to thank my best friends for being with me after volunteering after another awesome summer camp by the Mystic Art Center (MAC). The ice cream and summer shop browsing is fun to do. Next week will be a lot more fun and more time to use.

This week, I helped out Instructor Conam Lee, Alumni RISD Illustrator. For the five days, he taught the basic of comic book layouts and the expected presentation of different type of comic books. Conam was well prepared with a number of samples, especially with anime concept art and illustrator studio of Gurihiru. You may know this these people by the American Anime style like the "Avater, Last Airblender". Check out their artwork and their blog to see for yourself- http://gurihiru.blogspot.com/

Anyways, each day would be learning a new tip or technique for the students like drawing the suggestion of existing landscapes, negative & positive space and different perspectives. Then there would be assignment would be to draw a particular amount of panels, starting from two panels to five panels. But it isn't something that the students can make up, it is all decided by the roll of dice. Each side of the dice has an image and has to create the comic story with those images. It really strengthen the creativity and imagination when putting together sequence art. Especially with these students, who were really putting all their efforts into their comics like real live artist. For a moment, it actually felt like I was part taking in an illustration class, where the student do their critiques and I would let them work at their own pace unless they needed suggestions.

Overall, I really glad that I got to volunteer at this camp. I got to known a graduated illustrator from RISD who gave me great feedback on my work and good advice to think about when pursuing this field. Be sure to check out Conam Lee's digital artwork here and support his classes at the MAC: https://www.behance.net/conambnleedc73
Also, here are some of illustrations I did when helping out in the class.

Then on Monday, after last week pastel, I decide to try again. I wouldn't really call this a masterpiece, more like a color skin theory where I figured out the different tones of the body. I enjoyed creating the defined shadows on the body but it took a lot of time to color in the lighten up skin tone. There must have been four to five types of colors I kept layering. Even my teacher, Jennifer Wheeler, Alumni Fine art and illustrator teacher, allowed me to use her special portrait selective pastel to capture the warm curves on the form. You should definitely look at the website with her beautiful oil painting pieces, which are similar to her Wonderland painting :http://jawheeler.com/