#30in30for30: Introduction and Days 1-4

If you follow me on either Instagram, Twitter, Tumblr, or are friends with me on Facebook, you’ve more than likely seen one of my posts with the #30in30for30 hashtag. I’m sure some of you are a little confused, even. What, I’m sure you are asking to yourself, could this cryptic thing, ‘#30in30for30’ possibly mean?

OR if you actually looked at the post or heard me whine about it (which is more likely), you’d know exactly what it was. Because let me tell you, it’s a doozy.

OR if this is the first time you’ve even noticed it (which is also a distinct possibility), you’re probably incredibly confused about what I’m talking about at all.

Well hold onto your butts, because you’re in for a fun ride.

#30in30for30 is a title I came up with for an illustration project that I have to do this semester. But it’s not just any illustration project. It is the illustration project. Steve Hughes, the illustration professor here, as well as anyone who has taken (or, as is my case, currently taking) his AD219 class, has described it as one of the most time-consuming, challenging, and downright stressfully infuriating illustration projects ever: The Portrait Project.

The Portrait Project is horrifying. We have to finish 30 portraits before the end of this project. Ten have to be portraits drawn from live models, ten have to be famous people that all share a common theme, one has to be of an Abraham Lincoln bust that is in our classroom, and nine can be any portrait we want of whoever we want. Each portrait has to be 9 inches by 12 inches (I do not know the metric equivalent to this, because I am an American and by my nature, I am not to trifle with “lesser” terms of measurement). There have to be at least five with simple color harmonies, five with complex color harmonies, and five with contrasting color harmonies.

Seem daunting?

We cannot repeat a medium. I know that’s arty technical mumbo-jumbo you don’t know, so let me delve into that.

We are not allowed to do any more than one of these portraits in pencil. Only one can be in inkwash. Only one pastel piece allowed. And so on, and so forth. Granted, we are allowed to mix media (we can have an ink wash, a pen drawing, and an inkwash+pen work), but still, finding 30 combinations is a lot.

Scared? Still think that art majors don’t ever have to actually work hard at what they do?

Remember how there are three times that I wrote the word 30? Notice how I only named two? Well, here’s the kicker. We have 30 days to do these portraits. I know that’s difficult math, but that evens out to one portrait a day. And these can’t be quick sketches that I can finish in twenty minutes or so, these have to be worked on. So far, I’m averaging about three to four hours on each portrait. So that’s, on average, three to four hours daily.

30 portraits. In 30 mediums. For 30 days.

#30in30for30.

And it’s easily the most hectic, ridiculous, and most incredibly awesome thing I’ve ever done. Sure, I’m scared of this project. It’s the most challenging thing I have ever done with my art. And when I first heard about it, I nearly lost control of my bowels. But the amount of excitement I have for the project is overriding ALL of it.

Now, as of the writing of this post, I’ve finished 12 portraits. And somewhere between the time I finished the first and was about to start the second, I decided that I wanted to document the entire process. At first, it was just on my Instagram account (which is still running, with multiple daily posts), but I decided that I wanted to go a lot more in-depth with the process of a lot of these mediums. Turns out, a lot of people like to know about the process of my drawing just as much as the finished project, and a lot of people have actually asked me about how I do the things I do. Plus, it’s fun for me to talk about just what the hell I am doing up here in the Great White North.

So I’ve decided to do a series of posts on the whole process, and each one will have between 4-8 portraits or so, depending on how long I feel like spending talking about each one. Hopefully, this is insightful and interesting to you all, because it’s certainly an exciting experience for me. So here we go: Day One.

DAY ONE: completed March 11, 2014

Medium: Graphite

We got the assignment after a critique of our last project, so Steven (all art professors are liberal, as you might have guessed, and prefer we call them by our names) told us to start the project off easy with something like a self-portrait in a medium we were familiar with. Which is just what I did.

I decided that I was going to use a familiar medium to do a quick self-portrait on days one and thirty, so I chose to do graphite (read: pencil) on day one (I was going to do a pen work on day 30, but I'll get to that later. The previous portrait was thrown together in about an hour’s time, shading at all, so I could see what I wanted to work on and what I needed to work on over the course of the month. Personally, I’d like to work on the eyes. And the chin is a little wonky, but overall, I’m pretty happy with this.

FUN FACT: This was the first time I have drawn irises on a person in years. The last time was, oddly enough, on another self-portrait in graphite, now that I think about it, in the third month or so of my senior year in high school with the help of my teacher.

Wasn’t I a cutie?

DAY TWO: completed March 12, 2014

Medium: Digital

This is about the time that I decided to actually document the process via either Instagram or blog post, so I actually have pictures of the process, as opposed to the finished project.

As I mentioned in the introduction, I had to have ten of my portraits be famous people who were linked together in some way. In a surprise to no one, I’ve decided to make my pictures famous cartoonists. And I started with my personal inspiration in terms of cartooning, Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes, which, in case you didn’t know, is the greatest newspaper comic that has ever and will ever exist, as evidenced in these two strips here:

This is one that I particularly wanted to document, because I get a lot of questions about how I drew Douchebag Darrel back in the day and how I plan on drawing Douchebag Darrel in the near future (yes, I actually have plans to restart that, but it won’t be for at least a few months, so calm yourself.).

The process of doing online stuff is pretty simple. I actually start by sketching out the final image on paper, just like I would with most of my other portraits.

Once I get it really nice and pretty, I throw some ink on the lines and erase the excess pencil marks. At the end, the paper looks like this:

And that’s as far as I go in terms of physical work. The rest of it is all on the computer. I take the art in and scan it, then send it via email to my computer. The final inking is opened in a program called Adobe Illustrator, where I have it perform an image trace. I don’t have any pictures of this part of the process, because the entirety of it takes about 20 minutes, including walking from my dorm room to the library (where the scanner is) and back. It’s really a quick process.

Image trace is a nifty tool on illustrator that cleans up a lot of the lines on the original picture and cleans up a lot of the dirt smudges from the original scan. Any remaining smudges I just erase in Photoshop.

Oh, right, Photoshop. Yikes, is this part time-consuming. Between the original coloring, secondary shading, changing levels, and adding effects, this part of the portrait took about 3 hours overall, and let me tell you, it was rough, but totally worth it. I connected my Macbook to my TV via HDMI cable, sat on my beanbag, and did a lot of shading with my Wacom tablet. It was a pretty cool setup.

Once that is finished, I usually save the file as either a PDF or a TIFF (if that even matters to you). And that is the process of how I do digital work! After the initial coloring, it looked like this.

I then tweaked the color just a bit on his sweater and added a diffuse glow filter on Photoshop and now it looks like this.

It was a massive workload, but I am incredibly proud of it.

DAY THREE: completed March 13, 2014

Medium: Crayola Marker

For day three, I decided to branch out a bit. I didn’t want to exhaust my supply of traditional artistic endeavors just yet, so I decided to use a medium that was a little…less obvious.

Washable markers.

Now one thing that I noticed about markers-they don’t blend. Ever. And as I only bought a 10-pack because of laziness, I only had limited ways to work. Fortunately, a requirement (yeah, there were more requirements about color harmonies and stuff) was to work in complimentary colors, which means working with only two colors opposite each other on this color wheel:

I only had three harmonies to choose from, but I figured out what I wanted to do pretty quickly.

That night in illustration class, we had our first live model. I worked with him, and here’s how it all worked out!

DAY FOUR: Completed March 14, 2014

Medium: Inkwash/Pen

I decided that next morning to continue my series of ten famous cartoonists, and what is a more famous way of presenting cartoon works than comic books? And who is the most recognizable face in comics? Or at least one of the most recognizable faces, I guess. I really don’t know much about Comics apart from the Marvel movies. But what I do know is that Stan Lee is a huge inspiration and I really wanted to do him.

A portrait. I wanted to do a portrait of him.

Sickos.

Now, like the portrait of Bill Watterson, I wanted to incorporate something with the most famous character the artist has created. I certainly had plenty of choices to choose from, but I decided that Spiderman would be dynamic and fun.

Originally, I was going to do this portrait in charcoal and pastel, but then I started working on the quick sketch.

And the more I drew,

The more I knew what I medium I had to finish this in. Now, I really haven’t discussed what my favorite medium to work in is. And that’s mostly because up until this year, I didn’t really have a preference. I used to only love working in pencil. Then I fell in love with charcoal. I actually would have said that charcoal was my favorite medium to work in all of last year, even when I started doing things digitally. But last semester, I got my first opportunity to work in ink, and even though I absolutely despised it at first, I quickly fell in love with it, in a sappy rom-com way as well.

There’s just something that’s absolutely wonderful with working in ink. Bright and bold colors, putting in minute details, mixing colors to create new ones, adding wash after wash, it’s probably the best thing I’ve learned how to do as an art student here. The process, however, tends to get a bit long and complicated.

After the initial sketch is finished, I trace over the final lines with pencil onto a sheet of tracing paper. After that, I will color underneath the lines with a really soft-tipped pencil, usually a 6B. Like so.

After that, I will place the piece of tracing paper onto my watercolor board. This board is actually a drawing pad. The pad itself is 20 sheets of thick, cold-pressed watercolor paper attached to a thick board on all sides so that it doesn’t buckle under watercolor, acrylic, ink, or whatever I decide to put on the paper. What? Never seen a drawing pad like that? Well, I’m not surprised, because they certainly won’t sell these at Target. No, I had to buy this sucker online for just under $40.

By the way, the drawing pad has 20 sheets of paper. So I’m paying about $2.00 per piece. AND IT’S SO WORTH IT but I’m losing focus here.

ANYWAY, I then trace the picture again onto the watercolor paper, and go at it with inkwashes. I usually put down one flat wash right away and then layer shadows on top of it to get bolder colors and darker shadows.

After I finished with the washes, I decided to go back in and put in some line work to make the piece look more like a comic book (eh? Because Spiderman? Comics? I’M SO FREAKING CLEVER), and it came out like this, about 12 hours after I started the initial sketch.

Was it excessive? Yes. Was it time-consuming? Of course. Was it probably a little too much time spent on one portrait? Without a doubt. Was it totally worth it? Oh hell yes.

NEXT WEEK: I’ll discuss the next five portraits or so, which include a portrait of Charles Schulz, my new disposition towards Crayola art supplies, and MAYBE some Babe-raham Lincoln????

ALSO, if you want to stay up-to-date with the #30in30for30 project, check out my Instagram account and focus on the hashtag #30in30for30. Most of the pictures featured in these blog posts will be on that, and it updates a lot faster than this old blog site. It won’t be as in-depth as each of these pieces, but if you just can’t wait to see what else I’ve put together, there’s your sneak peek!

Until next week!