Laurel Williams

Hi All!

So with Junior Studio II completed, these are all of the finished watercolors and titles:

“Little Miss Lu & Vanity: The Most Interesting Girl in the World (or so she thinks)”

“Little Miss Lu & Lust: The Holy Marvel Trinity”

“Little Miss Lu & Greed: The PillowPet Hoarder”

“Little Miss Lu & Envy: The Conundrum of the College Kid”

Hello everyone! 

I ended up deciding that I really need to practice with digital painting/drawing in photoshop a bit more before I’d feel comfortable making some finalized cartoons, so instead I’ll be saving that part of my project for the summer and keep on practicing for now. In the meantime, I still needed to finish the Seven Deadly Sins watercolor/cartoon series part of the project so I decided to do that for this quarter instead (that way I don’t have to drag my supplies back to SoCal with me). So here are some thumbnail sketches for the final pieces...

Two for PRIDE that I decided not to go with:

Thumbnail version of PRIDE:

Thumbnail versions of LUST and GREED:

Thumbnail version of ENVY:

...and more recently, the underdrawings for the final versions of LUST and PRIDE:

Hey Ya’ll!

This past week I spent some time taking notes on an online tutorial/workshop from CartoonSmart.com called “How to Make Comic Strips” by Paris Christou. It’s a six hour series which I finished during the week. It basically outlines the general process of developing appealing characters, reusable digital character sheets, coming up with scripts/humor and how to produce and organize comics. 

I won’t bore you with all the details but some of the highlights from my notes include simplifying characters, stages for drawing characters quickly and in different poses/from different angles, integrating squash and stretch and placing high importance on line of action as shown below in these screen shots of a lesson: 

I also focussed on reading and working through my textbook on digital painting in photoshop this weekend. I set up my tablet, Photoshop preferences and played around with tools for a bit just to get used to it. I’ll begin re-developing my character/s, making character/model sheets, scripts, thumbnails and hopefully a comic strip or two by the end of this quarter (so probably I’ll just be working on character re-designs this coming week). 

Hello Everyone!

This week I spent preparing my project proposal, gathering inspiration for my project board and searching for a workshop or tutorial/s that suits my purposes for this quarter’s project and here’s how it went:

Proposal

My plan for this quarter is similar to that of winter’s, except not learning the techniques of pastels. Rather, I will be teaching myself to digital paint in photoshop (with the help and guidance of a book called Beginner’s Guide to Digital Painting in Photoshop by 3D Total Publishing) and then use what I learn in the first few weeks of the quarter to re-develop a character I’ve created and turn it into a comic strip. My character is called Little Miss Lu (or Lu for short) and is a caricature of myself that I created in our watercolor class this past fall. My final “series” will be the groundwork for this comic which I will continue to develop over the summer and present in a public RAWartists show in San Francisco this coming fall. 

Inspiration

My inspiration for this comic is chiefly myself and my weird adventures/escapades/habits, my dog who is equally as sassy/quirky and will be my side-kick (Little Miss Jacquette), my watercolor paintings and Jacque character designs as concept inspiration, and the animated/regular comic strips of Mickey Mouse & Friends, Charlie Brown/Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes. Included are my own paintings and dog design:

Workshop/Tutorial