Monday, March 3, 2014

Lilla Rogers' Bootcamp... gone cuckoo!!


Month one in Lilla Rogers' Bootcamp has come and gone, along with February, so I thought I'd give you a quick recap! First of all, I wasn't sure at first whether or not to sign up for this course, but somehow I knew that once I started seeing all the beautiful pieces coming in, I knew I would want to get in on the action. I work better with a brief anyway, and bootcamp is a more affordable option to Lilla's classes. If you have been on the fence about taking one of her MATS classes, this is a good opportunity to get your feet wet. The schedule is much more spread out, with a week for the mini assignment and then 2 weeks more to develop the final and upload it on the gallery on her studio site. In MATS, you have less than a week to do the same thing, so time seemed like a luxury.

Being a natural born procrastinator, no surprise I abused the time frame and essentially did it in a week, but somehow, it seemed far less stressful than MATS. I actually really liked the subject matter of cuckoo clocks! Being a collector of all things cute, german and wooden (a.k.a. smokers, wendt & kuhn flower children, angels and various other bavarian kitsch) , it appealed to me. We had a cuckoo clock in my house growing up. Can't imagine having one now with the chiming and cuckooing in the half hour, but you do get used to it. 

here's a little peek at my WIP in illustrator. I did everything in it.
The challenge came in when Lilla defined the end piece as a cell phone case. Cuckoo clocks are loaded with rich details, so it was hard to imagine how it would all translate well down to a such a small format. I played around with some different ideas, like turning it into a skyscraper type condo bird house, not unlike the ones you can buy for purple martins, or possibly making a city scape out of different clocks/houses, but in the end, I decided to focus on the birds. My thinking was that it might be a good way to fill the vertical space of a phone case and besides, birds are cute and fun to draw. As far as style, I went for a symmetrical folkloric look, kind of like the party paper assignment at the end of MATS B. What can I say, I'm a sucker for symmetry ;) It was fun to try to give some of them a little personality. 

The gallery of over 400 cuckoo cell phone cases is amazing. A ton of great pieces, so if you have the time, check it out here.  Enjoy!!



10 comments:

  1. Hey Jill-Thanks for sharing the large and up close view of your piece. It's so wonderful to see all of the juicy details that you can't see at the smaller size. Looks fantastic...no surprise there!

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    1. thanks Tracy! I wan't really happy with my presentation page that I used for the gallery. In retrospect, I think it needed more contrast in the background and the colors looked to soft at the thumbnail gallery size. I think it looks better just as a print.

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    1. thanks Lauren! You know how much I love yours!

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  3. Absolutely gorgeous as is your site banner !!

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    1. Susan!! Thanks very much for dropping by and the nice words :)

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  4. Wow, such a beautiful piece and I am flabbergasted at how you pull this off in Illustrator. How long would you say this took you from sketch to final art?

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    1. thank you Pia! I don't know my way around photoshop very well, so this is the only way I know how to work. I'd guess after the pencil sketch, which you can see on this one was pretty rough, it takes me around 4-6 hours to redraw all the shapes and then another 4 plus to color and render? I worked on it on and off for about 4 days. The initial redrawing is the the part I dislike the most... so mind numbing. I love it when I get to the point where I can add the color (my favorite part :) Thanks for coming by!

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  5. Hi Jill,

    I really enjoy your illustrations and following your blog. It's really cool to see what you are doing and your process.
    I was wondering if you had a system that you use for organizing your files? Do you name them in a certain way? Or have a routine for backing them up? Just curious!
    Thanks!

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    1. Hi Kate, well, I'm flattered that I come off as being organized because I am definitely not! It's certainly an area that I could use improvement. Other than the typical organization by project folders, I have a separate time machine backup drive that I hook up to about once a week. I could use a more consistent naming convention...let's just say I am organizationally challenged ;) thanks for coming by! Jill

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