Thursday, June 14, 2012

Summer commissions open!

Commissions are open for the summer! I'll be taking batches of five at a time until further notice.

Slots:
1. M.C. - illustration w/bg, 1 character - done!
2. M.B. - digital sketch, 2 characters - done!
3. P. - illustration w/bg, 3 characters - done!
4. M. - 2 fully shaded busts - 1st half paid, coloring
5. A.K. - 2 pencil lineart w/ flat colors - 1st half paid, coloring

Notes/Rules: -I'll be opening up five slots at a time and will complete at least 3 or 4 commissions before I open up new spots.

-Please e-mail me at kecky415(at)sbcglobal.net to claim a spot. (I won't be using DA notes this time, I prefer to keep everything in one place.)

-I accept Paypal, and ask for half payment before beginning on a commission and the other half when I have completed it. If you are uncomfortable using Paypal, I can take credit/debit card payments directly through my Etsy shop - please let me know if you would prefer to pay this way and I will create a listing for you.

-If you are not satisfied with the final version, I will gladly fix any small issues with it; however, for each revision after the first one I will add a $5 charge to the fee to be paid upon completion. To clarify, this applies to changing hair/skin/background/clothing color, accessories, etc.

-I will send you the full-resolution file by e-mail upon completion so you can print out as many copies as you desire for yourself. If you don't have a way to print it yourself, I can have prints made and sent to you for an additional fee of $10 (US) or $15 (international).

-I still retain the rights to any artwork created and may sell prints of any commissions I do. These prices are for commissions meant for personal use and do not include commercial use, like selling copies yourself or using the prints for business-related purposes.

-If I don't receive payment within 3 days of a slot being claimed, I may take you off the list if anyone else wants your spot.

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Portrait of the Artist as an Animation Student Whose Film Is Due Like Next Week



I drew this last spring during finals (because I take breaks from drawing to draw) and then forgot about it. It's still relevant.

And, I know, I really need to get a new layout for this thing. I don't know why I thought that resizing every picture to 480 pixels wide was a thing that I would actually feel like doing. Plus it's kind of hideous, but that's okay cause I've known that all along and I love it anyway.

Friday, September 23, 2011

demo reel 2011



I finally got around to making an animation demo reel! It was thrown together pretty quickly, and some clips are pretty bad quality since I had to download them from youtube, but I hope you will enjoy it anyway. And I promise to make a much better one at the end of this school year!!!

back to school + commissions CLOSED

Commissions are closed now! Sorry I left misleading information up for so long. I need to focus on schoolwork now, and also this ~*big project*~ that I'm going to be all mysterious about until I'm more sure that it's really truly happening.

But yeah, school! I had a tougher time getting into things this year - I didn't exactly have the most relaxing summer, and then leaving Florida was hard, and then leaving Missouri was hard a week after that, and ~jerseygrl422 was supposed to be my roommate but she defected to the University of the Arts which was sad. But I ended up with a lovely quiet roommate, so that's all good, even if we didn't get to wallpaper our entire room with Disney pencil test sketches like we'd planned. It's a beautiful rainy day today so I feel extra like everything is right with the world.

My classes are good! I only have 4 of them this semester which is extra good!!! I'm loving my animation class - it's already helping me a ton. My teacher worked at the Disney studio in Florida (god rest its soul) for several years, and, and, and HE ANIMATED JIM HAWKINS but the point is, he's been where I want to go and he knows, man. His class is also really tough and he has very high expectations of his students, which I think is great. I'm not paying zillions of dollars to go to this school just to be told I'm special just the way I am.

I'm also taking life drawing, always super helpful and good to work on; layout and design which I'm less enthusiastic about at the moment but is something I know I need to work on (it's also from 3-6 pm, which is the time of day when my ability to focus basically goes ppppbpbbbtt. I don't know what I was thinking when I made my schedule) and I think I will get more into it as the semester goes on. And my other class is sound design, another one of those I'm not like crazy passionate about but I'm getting more into it as I learn a little bit more about it.

I was taking a 5th class, but I dropped it because it was adding a small amount of stress to my already angst-filled life and I wasn't sure if it was even my thing at all, and I didn't need the credit at all, (I have like seventeen thousand hours on my transcript and could theoretically graduate this year if my required classes didn't require being spaced out over a full four years, which I try not to think about too much, and besides, it gives me lots of room to take lots of interesting electives.) so anyway, I dropkicked that class out the window and now I'm like WHOOO TWELVE CREDIT HOURS!!! basically.

I'm going to try really hard to be better at blogging this year! Really I am. I promise.

Saturday, June 18, 2011

Commissions open!

Hey! I hope everyone is having a super awesome summer!!! I'm working at Disney but I've also reserved a couple days a week to work on my art. I'm creating a bunch of new personal work but I also want to start taking on some commissions again.

Here's everything you need to know!

Prices:
Pencil sketch with optional digital tint or texture - examples 1, 2, 3
Bust (head & shoulders) - $10
Full body - $20
2 characters - $35

Full color digital or traditional portrait with simple pattern background - examples 1, 2, 3
Bust - $50
Full body - $80
2 characters - $130

Full color illustration with 1 or more characters and complex background - examples 1, 2, 3, 4
Starting at $150 - please contact me for a final quote

Custom lettering for logo, blog header, etc. like the "signature" I use on my recent artwork - example
$50 and up, per word, depending on length
Final product is a high-res .png file with transparent background.
(I've never done any commissions like this but I've been getting very interested in hand lettering and would really like to try, which is why the price is rather low for a logo. If you need to see other examples, please let me know.)

Commission slots (to be done more or less in order):
1. B.W. - full body, color, 2 characters - 1st half paid, sketching
2. A.N. - full body, color, 2 characters - 1st half paid, sketching
3. S.W. - original illustration #1 - sketching
4. S.W. - original illustration #2
5. S.W. - original illustration #3

Finished & paid pieces:
1. W.S. - misc. illustration

Notes: (please read all before claiming a slot)
-I'll be opening up five slots at a time and will complete at least 3 or 4 commissions before I open up new spots.

-Please e-mail me at kecky415(at)sbcglobal.net to claim a spot.

-I accept Paypal, and ask for half payment before beginning on a commission and the other half when I have completed it.

-Please give me several photo references for any portraits of real people, and please keep in mind that I draw stylized characters, not reproductions of photos.

-I will send you a sketch for approval before adding color and shading.

-If you are not satisfied with the final version, I will gladly fix any small issues with it; however, for each revision after one I will add a $5 charge to the fee to be paid upon completion. To clarify, this applies to changing hair/skin/background/clothing color, accessories, etc, because you have changed your mind, not because of a mistake on my part.

-I will send you the full-resolution file by e-mail upon completion so you can print out as many copies as you desire for yourself. If you don't have a way to print it yourself, I can have prints made and sent to you if you just pay shipping and the print base price.

-I still retain the rights to any artwork created and may sell prints of any commissions I do. These prices are for commissions meant for personal use and do not include commercial use, like selling copies yourself or using the prints for business-related purposes. However, if you do want to use my artwork for a commercial purpose, like a poster or logo, please let me know beforehand and I can give you a special price. I usually just add 50% for advertising items that are not going to be directly sold.

-I may increase prices for future rounds of commissions, but anyone who has already claimed a spot will keep the price they were given when they signed up.

-If I don't receive payment within 3 days of a slot being claimed, I may take you off the list if anyone else wants your spot.

I know it sounds like a lot of rules, but I just want to make sure that everything is clear in case there are any issues. If you have any other questions, or had in mind something that doesn't fit into any of the categories here, please let me know!

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

school stuff part 1

well it is time for all my final projects to be due at once! hooray!!!
i finished these little buggers last week for anatomy class-



Each panel measures 22x30" and was drawn with a combination of col-erase and prismacolor premier pencils. They also took me far more hours than I care to think about.

Saturday, March 26, 2011

RIP Diana Wynne Jones.

If you hadn't already heard, Diana Wynne Jones passed away last night at the age of 76.

I've been spending the day moping around, dredging up all my old fanart and spamming tumblr with it, and trying not to cry whenever I think about the fact that one of my greatest heroes is gone.

I'd like to make some attempt to put into words what this woman has meant to my life, and how her stories have inspired me, so I hope you'll bear with me.

I don't remember which of her books I read first - I think it might have been Year of the Griffin in 7th or 8th grade. I do recall that my love for her writing didn't arrive all at once, but I liked whatever book it was enough to check out another of hers, and then another and another as I discovered that every single one was just as brilliant as the next, and there were dozens of them. I'd say Witch Week (weirdly, the first of the Chrestomanci books that I read- I went all out of order) was really the one that cemented my fervent admiration, and it's still tied with The Lives of Christopher Chant and A Tale of Time City for my very very favorite. It contained so many of my favorite things - secret powers, parallel universes, British accents - but somehow it was completely different from anything I'd read before. For one thing, it was so smart. Like so many DWJ books, I had to read it a few times before I really comprehended the whole plot, and every time I reread it, it surprises me.

And the characters - oh, the characters! I've doodled Charles, Nan, Estelle, Theresa, Nirupam, Simon, all of them, so many times - they just beg to be visualized, because they are absolutely alive. They are not vague suggestions of schoolchildren, with gratuitous flaws tacked on to their interchangeable personalities to make them "interesting." DWJ's heroes (all of them) are so wonderful because she let them be nasty, selfish, sulky, awkward real people. What I mean is, she gave her characters flaws not in a way that's supposed to make them endearing, like, oh I don't know, if somebody wrote about a completely bland character who is somehow supposed to be likeable and relatable because we are told in every. single. paragraph. about how clumsy this theoretical character is.

On the contrary, Charles Morgan is quite a repellant little bugger. But by the end of the book, we are surprised to discover that we love him in spite of it. Aren't our little siblings such repellant little buggers too? And if we do end up loving Charles' sociopathic tendencies, or Chrestomanci's vanity, or Nan's insecurity, anyway, it isn't because their faults somehow make those characters cute, but because they make them who they are.

Going deeper, I've only recently begun to understand the way that DWJ always let her characters understand each other's faults, in ways that most children's and young adult literature glosses over. Conrad and Millie rag on Christopher behind his back, but haven't we all done that? And don't we all understand that it doesn't mean we love our best friends any less? Think about Moril and his siblings, in Cart and Cwidder, coming to realize that their mother never really loved their father the way they always thought. It's extremely upsetting, of course, but it's not the center of the story. It's only the beginning of a much wider tale, and somehow, I find that reassuring. The illusions we hold in regards to the people we love get torn down, and though it may seem devastating at first, it doesn't have to destroy our love for them.

Well, I'm getting into paper-writing mode, and I haven't even gotten to the most important part: the magic.

I don't even know if I can put this point into words with precise little examples. It's just this: Diana Wynne Jones has kept me believing in magic until age 24, and that feeling is refreshed every time I reread one of my favorites. (Of course she's had some help from C.S. Lewis and Patricia McKillip and J.K. Rowling along the way.) Maybe it's more accurate to say that she has showed me glimpses of real magic, allowed me to believe that it can exist in the real world, and inspired me to capture a little bit of that magic through writing and drawing, so I can make it real for myself.

There's just something about the silly, petty everydayness of her worlds, which, when mixed up with the soaring, unexpected fantasticality of what happens in them, creates a sense of magic and wonder more wonderful than any self-serious sword-and-sorcery epic.

Which is just my opinion, of course. But I just wanted to try and explain the shape of one woman's tremendous influence in my life, and I wanted to honor her memory, and simply say - you will be very, very missed by this particular rabid fangirl. Rest in peace.

Monday, March 21, 2011

minty fresh

tried a little speed painting today and did this in 2 hours:

mintysm

Basically, I'm really, really slow at drawing. I'll routinely spend days painstakingly redoing a hand until it looks right or I give up. I start way more projects than I finish, because after I spend a couple weeks on something, the fun tends to wear off and it's still only halfway done.

This tendency is REALLY hampering the progress of my film, and I'm getting REALLY stressed out by the massive quantities of time it's taking me to get the slightest little things done. So I thought I'd take a break and practice not being so anal.

This might have been counterproductive though? Because I look at this and still just think about how much I need to fix her awkward back. Oh dear.

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