Janet Konakova illustration blog

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Drawing Workshop Week 2 - Drawing the Self

I was quite excited for this workshop as I love portraiture and drawing self-portraits is something that I have experience in. So the opportunity to learn new techniques and ways of mark making was very welcome. My task for the day was leaning more towards quantity and experimentation instead of focusing on details. The materials I had around me for the day were charcoal, coloured pencils, Indian ink, markers, oil pastels and graphite pencils.

The first portrait had to be timed with 5 minutes, if I remember correctly. I made it with pressed charcoal and a pink marker on thick watercolour card that was already stained with Indian ink from previous projects. I thought it would be interesting to try working on canvas of different thickness and material. It was a gorgeous sunrise as I was looking at myself in the mirror and I wanted to capture the light shining on my face through soft charcoal smudges. The harsh charcoal linework around my face was not intended and done for the lack of time but I think it works quite well creating effective negative space and letting the ink marks show. The pink glasses was the last addition to the piece, as I was missing a more modern looking pop of colour and pink has been my favourite colour to work with recently.

The second piece was made completely in charcoal but this time I used fixative in between every layer of charcoal to really make sure that every stroke and accidental smudging shows. This would create a fuller piece with higher contrast, drama and emotion. I had more time to finish this piece as well, around half an hour, so I wanted to push likeness in this one more than in the others. I used less smudging and more rough, fast paced strokes to create movement and drama. At the end though I wasn't quite dramatic enough so just like in the previous piece I grabbed a pop of colour. This time oil pastel in red to, to be entirely honest, convey how fed up I am.

The next piece is the smallest scale portrait I have ever made, I've been criticized over not experimenting enough with canvas size so this was a useful exercise. The technique was to have a photo of yourself in a sideways profile that you would cut out a stencil from. The stencil was then put on top of another piece of paper and filled in with smudged charcoal powder. Then instead of adding more layers of charcoal, you were to take a small piece of putty rubber and erase the highlights of the portrait. At the time I did not have access to a printer or a large enough image of a side portrait so I worked off a picture on my phone instead and that's why the portrait had to be small scale. There are certain challenges that came with that but I think the essence would be exercised was fulfilled I've learned a very interesting portrait technique.

After that I think I've had enough of charcoal so for the next portrait I moved on to oil pastels, which as you might have noticed has been my favourite medium to use recently. We had quite a while to use on this portrait as well and we were encouraged to work with colour this time. Just like the first two portraits I worked with a mirror, this time concentrating on the use of colour and portrayal of emotion rather than likeness. I've made a couple of oil pastel portraits before and sometimes I struggle with mixing colour without having it build up too much and look like desaturated dirt. It's not something that I've managed to avoid in this portrait either, however I do like the blue shadows and yellow highlights together in this piece.

The last portrait was done in Indian ink and a graphite pencil. I do not have much to say about this one, I worked on it for a long time but kept being dissatisfied with the results so eventually I just had to leave it as is. I was trying to use different brushes and types of marks which usually looks good but this time they didn't because there wasn't enough consideration of the strokes. The graphite pencil talk was last ditch effort to create more depth and contrast.

[janetkonakova]

Drawing Workshop Week 1 - Drawing the Talisman

In the past year I’ve been working hard focused on the professional appearance of my illustration and its display. That means less time spent drawing and painting, and more time around the laptop. The visual diary project has been useful in combating that but also I cannot tell you enough how lovely it has been to set out time every week to practice traditional mark making. 

These images are from the first week of drawing workshops, focusing on technique and still life. The first two images are me trying out different brushes and ink techniques. I didn’t really expect myself to like and post them, I’m often lazy with mark making studies and somewhere in the back of my head i think of them as redundant. They’re pretty neat though, in abstract. 

Second image is of lemon prints as we were encouraged to use kitchen produce with ink to create marks. I had a lemon at hand so I dipped it in some ink. What I didn’t expect is for the ink to react oddly to citric acid and assume the texture of clumpy PVA-glue. That really showed on the paper print and it looks really cool, sadly the roughness doesn’t translate digitally that well.

The last experiment was a simple gradient ink wash. I’ve made these before plenty but it has been a while since. It refreshed my creative thinking a bit, I think I’ll use all the experiments from this workshop in future edits.

The main task of the workshop was to create a still life drawing/painting looking at arranged objects from home. I picked up a little cardboard house I have made for the last semester’s stop motion project and put it besides/on top of my teeny basil plant. I thought the house would add surrealism to the composition, making it look a bit out of this world despite being an observational drawing. I took a couple of pictures with and without directed light but ended up painting from life. As I went, I was trying to reflect the mark making exercised in this still life, putting a lot of thought into technique. In the end I really like the marks and paint splashes and it’s exactly what I was going for but I do think concentrating on that I forgot to pay attention to composition. 

[janetkonakova]

This is gonna be a long one.

Planning and making props for this project was probably the longest process out of everything that went into it. I don’t have much experience in prop making in animation but it’s been a point of interest so the process was fun at least. 

I started by going over my storyboard, figuring out what I wanted each scene to look like and how can I execute it. As always some plans stayed the same but some also inspired new ideas as I was going. For example made the three confetti GIFs in the Stop Motion app in a studio workshop. I had a very clear idea of what I wanted them to look like but after getting some lecturer feedback and seeing the end result I had to rethink my methods. Back at home I remade the poppers and the confetti (paper cutouts slide) by making them 3D in stead of the 2 dimensional drawings in the first version. I spend a little bit more time and thought on the confetti as well.

I was using different textured white paper for most of the snow and ice imagery. I felt like paper cutouts would show both rough ice shapes and soft snow quite well. This is demonstrated especially well in the first scene of the animation where an iceberg disappearing into water (video of the process below.) The A4 printer paper was quite easy to make an iceberg shape out of by folding, cutting, attaching etc. and how easily it melts into water would mimic iceberg falling with style. It took me a while to figure out how to make the iceberg descend without me being in the frame while also taking clear photos. I ended up attaching a white thread to the back top of the iceberg and descending it that way.

I don’t have a tripod at home so I decided to have most of my shots be ratational stills which would simplify the filming process and ensure that the animation runs smoothly. I watched a couple of youtube tutorials on stop motion animation which were extremely helpful for a complete beginner, edu puertas channel was an absolute lifesaver.

I ran out of time in the end and didn’t finish the animation but I’m quite pleased with some of the shots, e.g. canfetti popping scene is my pride and joy.

While setting up most scenes i would figure out the camera position first, then make adjustments to the scene if necessary and take practice shots with different lighting to see which light colour/position looks best.

[janetkonakova]

Narratives in Motion | First Steps

This project is long gone and submitted but I’ve now made it into a personal project that I’ll keep working on. The brief was to make a 1.5 min stop motion animation from one of the texts we’ve worked with in our first project this semester. I’ve decided to go with the same Ice Man text because I already had very solid ideas developed around that story. I worked on compiling inspirational images which you can see in my Pinterest board here. This time going for a slightly different mood and aesthetic, something more somber and romantic compared to my playful zine, which you will see if you look at my Pinterest boards for both of the projects.

Sound was something that I started considering immediately and honestly tried to think of something that wouldn’t take much time or effort. Music video it was. Luckily I live with musicians, Lemonaid band so I offered to make a music video animation. The idea was to make the first half of the animation as a university submission that requires me to hit a 1.5 minute mark, submit, and work on the rest in my own time. This would make my job quite easy, only having to plan the animation around the song. 

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Making the Invisible Visible Part II GIFs

At first I attempted to animate the backgrounds with the new animation tool that Procreate added recently but that ended up being too complicated because it doesn’t offer an option to animate on separate layers, having layers as frames in stead. So I exported the stills to Flipaclip on my tablet which separates layers and frames as two functions. I planned to make more changes but I swiftly ran out of time and didn’t even get to finish the last, third image. I also encountered some new problems like one of the frames in the left GIF being a darker colour when I export it but shows no issues on the canvas while editing. I’ll need to figure that out later when I can.

[janetkonakova]

Making the Invisible Visible Part II Outcomes

So I didn’t end up adding more than one character to these but the painting the one character itself took about two weeks. I personally still stand by my decision and think that painting it digitally in detail made the character fit the surroundings pretty well but have a different enough texture to feel ethereal. My concept of this is that she’s stuck in a lonely dream-limbo, stagnated, while time and the surroundings pass and change around her.

I have some ideas of how I’m going to animate the background (see in the sketches post of this project) but I also like it as is. 

[janetkonakova]

Here are progress videos of me filling in Jess’ backgrounds in Procreate. I’ve used the sketches I made in the previous post on this project. I cut them out, placed and distorted them playing with composition, and painted over them with the Procreate oil painting brush on a separate layer and then deleted the original sketch layer. I struggled a bit with the first one in terms of the colour palette and the lighting/shadows but when I figured it out the other two went much faster and easier. 

As you can see in all of them I figured out where the light was coming from and drew red reminder arrows on a separate layer with low opacity. In a previous post I described myself planning to only have one or very few objects but to also spend quite a bit of time on painting them so the project wouldn’t lack effort. I went with the plan here. I ended up on the colour palette of the character via trial and error as I usually do. I had a general colour palette planned out in sketches (see previous project post) but my plans always end up being slightly changed in the process, which I think is a good thing. I ended up on a green and blue hues because the pieces had a lot of warm pinks and purples and I wanted the atmosphere to be a bit cooler in tone.  

My plan was also to animate the backgrounds a little bit but I don’t know how much time I’ll have for that. I’ll post the still images and whatever attempts I’ll have at animating in the next post. 

[janetkonakova]

Visual Diary Entries 27-30

(Click on images to see captions) These are the last visual entries I’m going to post in a while, I need to start prioritizing other things. The thing is, I don’t know how to realistically produce more work because my pace of doing things is quite slow even with the quicker pieces. The brief was to make a minimum of 75 entries, that’s a bit nuts. Maybe the pace is just a matter of skill and I’m learning to work faster but at this point I’m producing a mediocre amount of images at my absolute maximum effort. 

I’ve made enough entries that I like the concepts of so now I’m going to focus on editing and rendering them.

[janetkonakova]

Coming up with additions to Jess’ backgrounds. They are quite full and detailed already so I’m a bit nervous about making them look too busy. I kind of just want to add just one character and maybe some looping animation but I’m not sure if that’s going to be considered enough of a subversion. I’m gonna do it anyway though, this is what I feel is right right now. 

I knew I wanted some fort of sleepy looking feminine creature so I drew a bunch of characters. It’s funny I discarded the top right character immediately as I drew her but as I undecidedly started to sketch characters into the surroundings I realized I liked her the most after all, it just wasn’t a very good sketch. 

The idea is to make the background move but the character stay still, trapped in a dream land.

[janetkonakova]

To practice drawing sceneries we had an online class of going on a virtual trip around google maps, this time Venice, and “live” sketching the surroundings. It’s a pretty fun idea, I’m going to use it in my personal practice too. I got some new brush markers that had very vivid colours so I decided to try them out here. 

[janetkonakova]

Green Screen Studio Workshop

For the second part of this project I struggled picking the three landscapes of a classmate, there were so many good ones! I ended up picking Jess Van Baalen’s pieces. They’re absolutely fantastic and in a lot of ways similar to art that I like to create. I liked the dreamy and ethereal atmosphere, the colour palette of course and the beautiful detail in these paintings.

In the studio workshop we were trying to create a video by green-screening things on top of the backgrounds. I cut out a character to seem like it’s drowning in the river background and recorded the green screen on Zoom. 

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As I’ve mentioned in a previous post, some of my works have been featured in an online store Art by Iivanainen. The opportunity kind of came out of nowhere and I didn’t yet make any product pictures of the pieces. Suddenly I had to take loads of pictures and edit them to look good for the store a part from all the other bureaucracy that’s involved with selling art through someone else. I needed to prioritize this over university projects sacrificing as much time as I needed to get this done well. Ended up with 27 images all together, 2-3 perspectives for each product.

https://artbyiivanainen.com/collections/dreamy-and-whimsical-by-janet-konakova

[janetkonakova]

Inking in the Third Background 

Following the same guidelines I’ve set for myself in the previous backgrounds. This time however, I’ve decided to almost completely erase the original sketch and ink over it. I think you can tell I’m in a hurry with how messy some of the lines and blocks are but I’m kind of panicking about the workload. Having a regular job during the pandemic alongside all of this AND trying to take care of my mental health is just an absolute nightmare let me tell you. 

[janetkonakova]

Inking in the Second Background

With all the trial and error in the first background, this one was easier to get done. Followed the same colour palette and cleaned up sketch lines.It’s still a bit messy I can see but I need to move on for time keeping’s sake. Hopefully I’ll have time to work on it more later but if not... Here it is!

[janetkonakova]

Re-making the First Background

After realizing that I disliked soft watercolour inking with this aesthetic, I decided to keep working on this one first before the other two in case I learn something else along the way that would make me want to change things. I obviously changed the dimensions to the correct one by stretching out the canvas and redrawing and cleaning up the lines that didn’t fit the new size. I re-inked it completely by getting rid of the watercolour texture, which looks much better. I redrew the hammock with a reference this time because I just couldn’t make it look right.

[janetkonakova]

First Attempt at Inking 

As you can probably see form my inspiration post of this project most of the illustrations I found and am inspired by are inked digitally with untextured blocks. I really like that style but I wanted to try something different and ink this one in with a Procreate watercolour brush. I was also keeping the original sketch linework for that sketchy messiness. In hindsight I don’t think that was a good decision, but now I know. I also realized that I completely misread the brief and forgot to make this in the right dimensions, in stead working in the same square fit as the sketchbook that I designed these in. Shouldn’t be too hard to fix and I still haven’t started working on the other two so I can make them in the right dimensions to begin with. 

[janetkonakova]

Fine-tuning the scenery sketches. I’m trying to add a lot of detail and clutter to fill up the spaces. It’s part of why the cyberpunk illustrations I’m inspired by are so engaging I think. The bottom two sketches I wasn’t really basing on any reference image other that the simple sketches from before. The sketch on top I just couldn’t figure out how the perspective and buildings work in an alleyway so I had to look at the picture next to it to understand. It was really fun to come up with the objects to fill in the space and felt intuitive.