City of Thieves Book Cover

For my illustration class we could create a book cover for any book of our choosing. I did City of Thieves by David Benioff which is about two kids who get arrested during the Siege of Leningrad and are made a deal: they can win their freedom if they find a dozen eggs in the starving and frozen city. An awesome adventure ensues. I decided to depict the two boys in the snowy fields outside the city walking past a dead body.

Speed Paints

Did some quick digital paintings (I spent about an hour on each) over the weekend. This first one is from imagination and is a locomotive heading through a jungle.

These next to are color studies from photos from the book "Classic Russia Idylls" by Proctor Jones that I checked out from the library which features some beautiful landscape photographs.

Scratch Board

Neon signs and rainy streets are awesome.

Little Red Riding Hood

I had to come up with a monochrome illustration in a vertical format for the story Little Red Riding Hood. I really wanted to do a piece that had a different take on the story. After thumbnailing a few ideas, I sketched out this rainy alleyway in pen with Lil' Red being the only color in the piece. I painted the final image digitally.

Another thumbnail idea I came up with was making Little Red a Russian sniper in Stalingrad during WWII. I could see the story in my head with the wolf being a German counter-sniper or spy and grandmas house is a key strategic point. Little Red is red because she's communist. I think the idea fell a little too far from the tree to be used in class, but I painted my thumbnail up anyways for fun.

Watercolors

I enjoyed doing these pieces after learning a good way to approach watercolor painting in media class. I  wish to do a few more when I get a chance. Below are the pieces I did for class.

And below are just some I did in my sketchbook for practice and fun.