Haitian Woman and newborn

Early illustration from my newspaper days

I had been working at the Deseret News for about one year when I decided to try my hand at creating an artistic illustration using a pressure sensitive device. This wasn't entirely new to me, I had already owned a Logitech pen tablet for several years already and had produced several personal works with it. For this I decided to take an image which had already been published, draw a sketch on paper, scan the sketch into the computer, then render out a digital painting from the original reference.

Ultimately this was an attempt to show the management at Deseret News (In late 2010, right after a major layoff of a huge portion of the staff) that I had the chops to do illustration work. After creating this and showing it around, no one seemed too interested in the more traditional look. Which is fine. In the years that followed the Deseret News, like every other surviving Newspaper publication, would water down everything with their physical content. Currently you can subscribe to the, vastly reduced newspaper, and have it delivered in your mailbox. But about 99% of us just hit the internet on our mobile devices.

Fun sketching at Draw Night

Spent a couple hours with my Illustrator brother and some friends talking about sketching landscapes and the importance of doing thumbnails before engaging in a larger image.

I have always known the importance of thumbnails in the design process. But honestly I never really understood how they can be a launching pad for doing a landscape. Special thanks goes out to Michael Buhler for showing us how thumbnails can quickly get your creative juices flowing in a quick easy way.

I quickly drew 3 thumbnails in row, shown below.

I liked the idea of the first one, a giant tortoise staring down a small character at the top of a cliff. I probably drew this from my first viewing of the Neverending story movie, in which the hero has a conversation with an ancient massive turtle.

I took this and expanded on the thumbnail below to create a larger more detailed sketch. I had great fun doing this. I may take this sketch to another level and create a digital painting. We'll see.

Inktober Illustrations

Progress using Krita as an illustration tool

Following are a few illustrations I did for Inktober. I was supposed to do an illustration every day during the month. Failed miserably. But I succeeded in using krita as a tool for producing quick illustrations with a newspaper comic look to them.

Love dinosaurs

I thought it would be fun to make most of these illustrations dinosaur themed. The question I asked myself: "What if dinosaurs existed during Halloween?" This is a question I wouldn't mind exploring further through art and illustrations. Hope you enjoy seeing these as much as I enjoyed creating them.

Squirrel cards

Been a while since I posted. Went through a little slump where I just didn't feel that creative. Hopefully I can produce a nice streak of posts in the next few months.

Today I am showing off a couple quick sketches I did for some small cards. Be sure to click on the image so you can see them in greater detail.

Copyrights Aaron Thorup

I simply cut an 8.5x11 sheet of heavy stock paper in half. Then folded those two pieces in half. On the front I sketched the small illustrations, you see above, in about 30 minutes. Medium was simply a black Bic pen. They were quite enjoyable to produce. Perhaps I should produce a whole line of squirrel themed illustrations and add color. We'll see.

Illustration complete

 

This illustration definitely had its frustrations but here it is, complete at last. Not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but decent. The series on my one-year-old children is now complete. In a few days I will have a 16x20 inch print that I will mount in a glass covered frame. I look forward to seeing all four illustrations side-by-side.

The eyes were a huge issue

For the last few weeks I have been frustrated in how the face was turning out. Just did not look right. Finally came to the conclusion that the eyes were too small and too close together. The thought crossed my mind to start the whole thing over. Instead I did some resizing and reintegrating of the eyes. Below is the the final result (Right) compared to an older version (Left). Not perfect, but immensely better looking than before.

Now I need to decide on my next big personal project. I have been meaning to do something with the original photos of my wife and I on our wedding. Perhaps that can be next years anniversary present.

Krita is a great program

Heres another call-out to the program known as Krita. Working in this program his a pleasure. Look forward to more creative work being done with this superb tool. 

Daughter illustration update, July

Been a while since my last update on this illustration. I went through a little funk where I just didn't have the desire to work on it. But I finally picked it up this last week and have made some significant progress. Below are some detailed images of the illustration as it is now. I have a bunch more detail to add. Should be fun though. Hopefully I will have this ready by my wife's Birthday.

Dragon eye, my first foray using Krita

This is my first attempt at using Krita to illustrate something. I felt like doing something in White on black, i also wanted it to be simple. So i typed in the word 'eye' in a Google image search. Found this really cool eye of an African cat. As I began I decided to ad some scales, turned it into a dragon's eye. Obviously this is no where near to complete, nor do I think I will complete it. This was just to play around, experiment, get to know Krita better. Love this program!