paprika

marika cowan / director / character designer / cel animator / 28 / located in Brooklyn

[marikapaprika]

So excited to announce the release of my first published book cover!! This project was such a blast to work on, and the book itself is a really cute, fun, silly read. If you like humorous YA fiction, I highly recommend Never Evers by Tom Ellen and Lucy Ivison! 

[marikapaprika]

My bf @steadysteadyco saw the athleisure self portrait I did the other week and asked me to do a portrait of him in the same style ❤️ Swipe for my alternate sketch of his usual at-home look: contentedly eating sardines straight from the can in his underwear. No idea why he rejected that one 🤔 (at Brooklyn, New York) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bp5fA-YB7Jt/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1tssrop2gu3mu

[marikapaprika]

Welp i tried to upload that last Halloween post as a GIF but apparently 13 MB is too big a file size for Tumblr?? Which is nuts bc i just spent the last hour trying to get the size from 60 MB down to 13 MB so it would be small enough to upload to Twitter...... So for now, re-posting via Instagram will have to do until I figure out how the heck I ever managed to upload GIFs to Tumblr in the first place ugh

[marikapaprika]

View this post on Instagram

🦇 HAPPY HALLOWEEN 🦇 . . . #animation #gif #artistsoninstagram #halloween #vampire https://www.instagram.com/p/BpnAZl-DETg/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=zbjw78mhjstq

[marikapaprika]

Hi Tumblr!!! Ugh I have been neglecting to post here BIGTIME. This is the first time I’ve logged in in almost a year! For anyone who has stuck around with this account, thank you SO much, and also I would like to announce that I am going to become active on here again!

Lately I’ve only been posting my new work on Instagram and Twitter (you can find me on those platforms here and here), but I want to start adding Tumblr back into the mix. So here is a small dump of some of the work I’ve done recently! If you’d like to see more from the past year, please head over to my Twitter or Insta. And moving forward, you can expect to see me posting new work on here again in the coming weeks.

Thanks again to those of you who have stuck around! I look forward to bringing this account back to life. <3

[marikapaprika]

Henlo Tumblr!! I’m tryna get in the habit of posting my work more regularly... Here’s a character design I worked on back in the spring, for the supermodel/philanthropist Natalia Vodianova. Her team commissioned me to create a “cartoon” alter-ego of her, to be used on her Instagram and social media platforms. They didn’t end up picking my designs in the end, but it was still super duper fun to work on!!

[marikapaprika]

Hey, for your ghastly evolution series, would you be willing to sell them as a print or stickers or anything? Or let me use them as my phone wallpaper? Your style is really great and I just want to see them all the time lol But I don't want to just save them without asking or anything

Hey dude! Thanks for your message and I’m so glad to hear you like my designs!! I have been considering selling some of my drawings as prints/stickers, but just haven’t gotten around to it yet as I’ve had a very busy year thus far with freelance work. But rest assured I will be setting up an online shop sometime in the future! .... It just might take a while for me to get around to it so I appreciate your patience ^^;; 

But as far as using them as phone wallpaper, please feel free to do so as much as you like!! I appreciate you asking my permission and I am honored that you would grace your phone with my lil ghosty ‘mons <3

[marikapaprika]

You are wonderful.

NO U ARE

[marikapaprika]

Hi love your art style! I was wondering if you have any tips on doing line art on the tablet and how to achieve dynamic line variation? Yours look so natural and smooth. Thanks in advance :)

Hey, thanks for your message! I’m glad to hear you like my work. ^^ Achieving any kind of line variation on a tablet or Cinqtiq is certainly tricky, and I think a lot of it just comes from long practice drawing digitally. That being said, I have discovered a couple of tricks that have helped me. (Disclaimer, I draw in Photoshop so these are going to be PS tricks.) 

1) Stumpy Pencil is my favorite Photoshop brush! It’s really natural-looking, and easy to use. You can download it for free here.  Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the download link. Any of Kyle T. Webster’s brush sets are also great, I use those all the time depending on what style of illustration I’m going for.

2) When I’m using Stumpy Pencil, or any other kind of PS brush, and I am not satisfied with the line-width variation, I usually open up my “Brush” panel and go into “Shape Dynamics”. I like to set the Minimum Diameter to zero, as well as turn on Minimum Roundness to “pen pressure” and set it to zero. That usually gives a nice fine, crisp lineweight that has a lot of variation depending on your pen pressure. You can make ink lines even crisper by making sure “Transfer” is un-checked, which gets rid of any opacity jitter.

3) You could also try messing with the pressure settings on your tablet. If you go into your Wacom tablet settings under the Control Panel/System Preferences menu of your computer, there should be a slider that allows you to designate how “hard” or “soft” you want your nib to be. I usually have mine set slightly firm.

Thanks again for your message and hope that helps!! <3

[marikapaprika]

Holy skbdjsnskwnso your artwork is amazing I'm so glad I stumbled upon this wonderful blog hejdjbdks 😻

Lol thank you I’m glad to hear you like my stuff!! ^^

[marikapaprika]

Hey guys, I did this flash tattoo page for the FLASH ME show that is currently up at Canal Street Market in NYC! If you’re into alternative tattoo art and blackwork, come check out the opening event this Wednesday, June 21st at 7pm where there will be live tattooing of select designs from each artists’ sheet!!

[marikapaprika]

Gloomy glooms

[marikapaprika]

Some wee oddishes! One of my fave ‘mons ^^

[marikapaprika]

Hey guys, here are some character designs I did for the teaser trailer for Bandai Namco’s upcoming project! You can view the animation > here! <

A few of these are just character exporations/sketches, and a few are the finished designs that I created for animation reference. You don’t actually see most of the characters head-on in the trailer itself, but we wanted to have full turnarounds mainly just for visual development purposes. Plus they were just super fun to draw lol.

I’ll also be posting a bit more of the concept art and probably some gifs if I can get my shit together in the coming week so stay tuned for that! 

[marikapaprika]

Some haunters to complete the trifecta

[marikapaprika]

Some quick gastlies and gengars!

[marikapaprika]

Dude! I didn't know there were more books to the Abhorsen series! Your Mogget popped up on the dash and made me all excited :D I have the first three next to my bed, and now it looks like I've two more to sink my teeth into. Marvellous!

YAAASS so glad to have helped you discover them!! The original trilogy are my favorites, but the other two are also awesome and offer a deeper look into the world/characters/magic, as well as both backstory and closure to arcs that span the original 3. I hope you enjoy them!!