Blog - Chalk Full of Dreams

The Clues and Mews Detective Agency

Rina Rozsas — Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:49:35 +0000

Here’s the breakdown for a piece I created along with a little story prompt.

Simon runs to his family's store after school. There, he solves cases with his trusty assistant, Mittens, who paws and scratches at everything to unearth clues. Office space for gumshoes isn't easy to come by these days!

Some colour studies.

Trying out values.

Thanks for looking!

Artwork for an Art Exhibit

Rina Rozsas — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 16:18:06 +0000

I’m finally able to share some artwork I was commissioned to create for an investment firm last year. The exhibit was to feature their employees’ kids’ artwork alongside a professional artist’s interpretation. I was told the event was inspired by the Monster Project, a project I participated in back in 2019. I really enjoyed working on these and I hope these kids keep creating as they have such a great imagination!

The exhibit was delayed until recently which is why I’m just sharing it now. Unfortunately, some of the work I do never sees the light of day (NDAs, projects getting cancelled, postponement, etc.) so it’s great when I do get to share.

What I recently learned from a workshop seems to have crept into my workflow: like those fun textures on the colourful dandelions!

Curiosity The Journey Kid's Artwork Kid's Artwork

Greys for a Graphic Novel

Rina Rozsas — Wed, 28 Dec 2022 23:29:33 +0000

Back in March of 2021, a friend of mine, Sam Noir, asked if I’d be available to help out a mutual friend, Matthew Tavares, on a graphic novel. Sam was lettering it and Matt had his hands full with the pencilling and inking. A lot of the colouring was still outstanding so I offered to help out where I could between my own client work.

The colouring, as it turns out, was all in greyscale but I figured it would be a great workout nonetheless, maybe moreso than if it were full colour. Matt sent some of his completed pages as a guide. In a case like this, I think can be useful to mimic someone’s style, for learning and as a production skill.

In the end, I completed the colouring of 65 pages. Of course, the curse of continual learning is looking back on something past and seeing things you would change. Still, it felt good to have contributed to this.

Below are some of the pages I was most proud of.

Check it out if you get a chance. Matt did a great job with the visuals! The book is also getting some great reviews: Buster, A Life in Pictures written by Ryan Barnett.

Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu

Rina Rozsas — Mon, 19 Dec 2022 23:12:06 +0000

I recently completed another course through Schoolism: Digital Painting with Bobby Chiu. I’ve had access to these courses for a while but between personal and client work, the challenge has always been motivating myself to actually go through them. In the past—when I did have time—I’d just skim the videos to try to apply it to my own work. However, I am encouraging myself to put in the extra effort to do the assignments and pay more attention to the lessons.

The lessons start off with foundational greyscale studies of objects and people, most of them timed. In one lesson, I drew the same girl 8 times in different orientations using the provided photo reference, then ultimately from memory. She definitely was burned into my brain by the end of it. Repetition is a great way to get to know your subject. In another of the timed lessons, a photo of Kim Jung Gi’s was referenced. The one on the left is Bobby’s where he prepared the under-drawing, curves and adjustment layers for us to paint in the highlight and darks; the one on the right is mine, drawn from scratch in about an hour.

Subsequent lessons focused on adding colour on top of the greyscale images Bobby created (you’ll probably recognize his iconic style in the fungi man and lizard creature). These were lots of fun to practice on.

I completed all of the lessons and, like in some of my posts, I will show only some of the results so I don’t give it all away.

Lessons 1 and 2: greyscale studies using a hard round brush with low flow and opacity

Lesson 3: Timed photo studies of Kim Jung Gi (the image on the right is mine done from scratch) I’m a lefty so placing the photo on the right was much easier for me.

Lesson 4: Applying colour to Bobby’s greyscale characters

Lesson 6: 20-minute greyscale studies from provided photos.

Inspired by the lessons I decided to take one of my character sketches and apply what I’d learned in this class. I may make a collection of these plant creatures.

21-day Environmental Design workout by Nathan Fowkes

Rina Rozsas — Sun, 30 Oct 2022 23:40:36 +0000

As an illustrator I’m often asked to draw or paint a variety of things so continual learning is a must.

Backgrounds are a skill I always felt I could improve so I decided to finally put my head down and try and plow through the 21-day Environmental Design workout by Nathan Fowkes offered by Schoolism, an online subscription-based artistic education. It probably won’t be my last as it was definitely an eye-opener to all the different approaches of backgrounds Nathan showed.

With the exception of a few lessons, each video was approximately an hour long. Nonetheless I found it took me much longer to paint, sometimes 3 to 4 hours or more. Following Nathan was a bit of a challenge for me as he flit about the digital canvas, rapidly changing brushes, and following along the applied adjustment layers. I found myself pausing and rewinding often.

While Nathan doesn’t provide the brushes themselves, he walks you through most of his settings. When the opportunity arose, it was easy enough to take a snapshot of the brush on screen and duplicate the configuration. One thing I noticed that would occasionally throw me off was brush strokes suddenly appearing as if some frames leading to them had been dropped although the narration did not suffer from it. I would rewind to see if I blinked but I chalk it up to creative editing.

While the style is different than what I’m used to, I found it to be quite educational and will definitely incorporate some of the things I learned into my own work. Below are a handful of the studies I did of Nathan’s compositions. I don’t want to spoil it for others taking the course. I painted these all in Photoshop.

Instructional Posters

Rina Rozsas — Thu, 14 Jul 2022 21:22:30 +0000

On September of 2021, Snack reached out and asked if I’d be interested in designing some characters in scenes for a series of instructional posters they were putting together for one of their clients, Reena.

I was given a design guide to follow. The challenge for this design was to limit lines and and shadows while also following their strict colour palette. Luckily, the images I sent back were on-brand, so, yay!

Below is a selection of the clean illustrations, approved sketches, and what I’m assuming was one of the final posters that Snack put together.

Tee Designs

Rina Rozsas — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 15:19:02 +0000

Around the end of May 2020, while I was in the midst of designing icons, Almex came to me with their idea to create a series of collectible T-shirts. They wanted something fun with a vintage feel to help promote their products; something that would harken back to the early nineteen century with a bit of a cartoony pinup style.

By a bit of a strange coincidence, I was, at the time, helping another artist colour their graphic novel based on Buster Keaton, a historical figure of the same era. I love historic imagery so this was right my alley.

One of the things I like about being an illustrator is the whole exploration process: looking up reference—poring over clothing styles, typefaces, etc., whatever needed to fit the image best—and learning enough about what I’m about to draw (the equipment). Hopefully, I was able to make the things happening in my illustration be somewhat believable for the intended audience.

Below is some of the process I went through for a couple of the tees.

Some character iterations.

These were rejected but I had so much fun coming up with these that I wanted to share.

Working through colour options.

Some earlier rejected concepts based on their suggestion of super-heroine figure possibly stopping the rip in the belt.

During the reference collection stage, one of the artists I felt most inspired by was Duane Bryers. His poses and expressions were so comical and well-executed that I felt an instant connection.

Icon Designs

Rina Rozsas — Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:29:59 +0000

Back in May of 2020, a friend of mine who worked for a conveyor belt company asked if I’d be interested in designing custom icons for their tablet, the ALMEXPAD Senior 3.0.

I was a little nervous — I’d never done anything quite like that before but was up for the challenge. I had been slowly been building my skills so I told myself, “Yeah, I got this!”

My first attempts turned out a wee bit too cute for the intended target audience (see the images below) and likely better-suited to a children’s book but some of the rejected sketches did evolve into some of the icons that were approved.

Designing icons for this project was a great experience and I learned a lot from it.

I designed 35 icons in total. Below is a small selection and some of my process.

Initial ideas.

2020 – 2021 Years in Review

Rina Rozsas — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 05:25:01 +0000

Now that I have a little break in between projects, I figured I should take some time to update my blog and share what I’ve been up to the last couple of years.

I always thought it a challenge that I could not seem to keep a consistent style and didn’t really want to. I was always trying out one thing or another (cartoon, realistic, anatomy, etc.) However, I believe all that practice and posting was beneficial because, throughout 2020 and 2021, I started receiving offers of work from some cool and interesting companies where I was able to put those skills to use. Unfortunately, I can’t mention some names because of NDA’s.

Over the past two years, I’ve worked on a variety of projects outside my comfort zone. I worked on video game backgrounds, did some concept art for a small video game company, created painted icons for a tablet interface, developed tee designs for a company’s promotion, greyscale colours for a graphic novel, character designs for a comic, and public service illustrations. Unfortunately, my social media and storefronts suffered because I didn’t have time for personal work. Despite that, I somehow still had some sales, especially masks! My heartfelt thanks for the love and support!

We also adopted 2 Bengal-mix kittens from the same litter: Thor and Loki. By a freak accident our dear sweet Loki passed away. It was very tragic and, for the longest time, we couldn’t bring ourselves to write about it. Subsequently, we ended up adopting a Siamese-Bengal mix and named him Baldur. We’re very fortunate the two boys got along and have become almost inseparable.

Baldur in front, Thor at back sunning themselves.

A small sample of some of the illustrations I’m allowed to share.

A small selection of icons I created for Almex Group.

One of the many tee designs I produced for Almex Group.

An early rough concept done for a video game company. While I and the client liked it, it didn’t make the cut. I later added a cat, just because.

Happy New Year and Best wishes for 2022!

Chorizo the Game Background Art

Rina Rozsas — Wed, 06 May 2020 18:56:41 +0000

Recently, I was asked to create some background art for an indie video game by an artist that I follow on Instagram. His project is still in production but he has kindly given me the go-ahead to share my contribution.

It was a happy coincidence that this opportunity came about; lately, I had been trying to incorporate more backgrounds into my personal work and posting them along with background studies to Instagram. He came across my “Goldhorn” painting and it aligned with the style he was going for. Because my background studies were more for learning, I wasn’t sure how they would work in terms of animation. Fortunately, this parallax animation didn’t require that I deviate too much from my normal workflow—keeping the foreground, mid-ground and backgrounds as separate layers. Of course there were some things I had to be more concerned with, such as painting-in hidden elements so the environment would appear more seamless when layers moved. It was a fun experience and I would welcome the chance to do work like this again.

The Backgrounds

I was sent the following sketches to use as guides. The last image—with the client's cute pig character for placement—is an earlier version I did of the hut scene. For the sunset scene, I was asked to change the monkeys to the “see/speak/hear no evil” iconic poses.

When there is more information available about the game it will be posted over at the official site.

A Look Back at Some of My Successes and Setbacks of 2019

Rina Rozsas — Sun, 05 Jan 2020 03:24:04 +0000

Some Setbacks:

Said goodbye to our fur babies

It was a stressful and emotionally-draining year for both the hubby and I. Our two cats became ill at the start of the year (one with stage-4 kidney disease and the other, rectal cancer). The one with kidney disease (left) lost his eyesight so we had to watch him more closely. He had fallen from a landing through a rail onto the stairs (luckily, not far). Needless to say, this scared us so the hubby built guards along the railings and to prevent future mishaps. Both cats ended up needing constant monitoring and care so it tied us to our home more than usual. Sadly, their battles ended later in the year, one shortly after the other's, and it was a truly heart-wrenching time for us. We know we were very lucky that they both reached the ripe age of 20 but it was still very hard to accept. They were our babies and had been with us since they were kittens. The house certainly feels emptier without them.

I also had some of my own health issues to deal with, one of which was the onset of severe back pain. I’m still trying to rule out the cause but it has slowed me down. I’m hopeful that I’ll figure it out and rectify it in the new year.

Although I did manage to create more art and post it, some goals that I had laid out for myself at the beginning of the year, both art and personal, weren’t reached.

I sum up the setbacks in this final image I drew for the year:

And some of my successes:

Gained new a client

An animator who follows me reached out to see if I was available to assist a project he was involved with. While working for this client, I learned some new techniques and had a lot of fun creating background illustrations and props for an instructional animation about ADHD. Once the project had completed and been made public, I was able to share it. It's an unusual but satisfying feeling seeing your work as part of an animation.

Worked with returning clients

It’s gratifying when clients come back to you for more work. It seems to validate that I did something right. At least I hope it does. Maybe it’s just good timing. Unfortunately, most of that work was either internal or not yet allowed to be shared.

Got my work published in a children’s art book

The Monster Project:

I was pleasantly surprised when I was approached to contribute artwork to The Monster Project: elementary students are asked to draw a monster of their own creation and artists from around the world are each matched up with a child and attempt to envision that child's creature rendered in their own style. The organizers had a big event late in the summer to present the new creations back to the kids so they could see where their imaginations and collaborations led. It made me happy to see the video of my chosen kid’s reaction to my artwork. I was delighted and humbled to also have my artwork included in the printed book. It turned out very nicely and if weren't for this project I never would have discovered so many other great artists. So thank you to the organizers!

Started to gain some more followers on my portfolio sites and more interest at my stores

This might be more common than I realize but, speaking for myself, an artist's ego is a fragile thing. It sure feels nice to be appreciated for what you do. As an artist that feeling perhaps goes a longer way. Could it be that the extra time & care spent posting and curating helped? I did spend more time working on the consistency of my art style; it's a constant struggle. I’m pretty sure being part of the Monster Project didn’t hurt.

Learned some new skills

I pushed myself to do more colour and light studies; I learned how to properly apply colour to a greyscale image, and learned some new techniques to speed up my workflow. I like to think that my design skills have also improved this past year.

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In the preceding images I used reference from The Mandalorian TV show and what I had learned from my classes with Sam Neilson to paint them. I drew this little fellow (yes, I know it's Baby Yoda AKA The Child) by breaking him down into flats, shadows, occlusions, highlights and final touches. It was good practice to focus on technique and application instead of just trying to race to the end result.

I also delved some more into animal anatomy because I want to get better at drawing animals and creatures:

I hope I'm not just imagining it but I started to notice a style beginning to emerge (see my earlier comment about consistency) and more of a direction with my work. It’s something I wasn’t sure I’d ever accomplish with my penchant for being distracted by bright shiny things and techniques.

Despite the setbacks I think there were some real positive gains and I look forward to what 2020 brings. Here’s to a healthy and prosperous New Year!

A Sad Good-Bye.

Rina Rozsas — Mon, 28 Oct 2019 04:25:08 +0000

Sadly, my full attention has been elsewhere lately. We had to say good-bye to our sweet cat Max yesterday—a little too soon after saying good-bye to our other cat, Dax, earlier this summer. After fighting an open wound for months and cancer in her lymph nodes, Max lost her battle.

Max was my husband's cat first (he had her for 20 long years) and over time I grew to love and respect her. She had her own personality. Unlike Dax, she was a quiet cat that didn't beg for scraps but would sit quietly and wait her turn. She was also selective to whom she gave her affection—and when. It took a while but I was lucky to eventually be included in that short list. I had to constantly remind myself that her cute wide-eyed stare didn't always mean I could pet her. We are heart-broken that she is gone; that both our cats are now gone. The house feels far too empty without them.

Max:

Dax:

Client Work—An ADHD Video for a Pharmaceutical Company

Rina Rozsas — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 23:28:45 +0000

I just found out that one of the projects I worked on this year was just made public so I’m finally able to share the video and show some of the assets I worked on: http://www.adhdandyou.ca/Parent/ParentKidsProgram.aspx

Illustrators can sometimes work for weeks or months on a project that can’t be shared until it goes public, if at all; client jobs don’t always appear to the public.

An animator I admire (RichToons) reached out to me earlier this year. He had a tight deadline and thought my cute cartoon style would lend itself well for one of his projects. He needed help with additional characters, backgrounds and props. I was surprised and flattered that he contacted me.

Here are most of the finished images I created for the video. Although the deadline was tight, I really enjoyed the challenge of working in someone else’s world yet was able to contribute a little bit of my own style.

I masked out the circled areas where the family members would go.

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Family Tree Brain I designed a handful of kids which I duplicated and rearranged to help created the illusion of larger group of kids.

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School Kids George - Classroom Scene Cashier Scene Ice Cream Truck The character was finalized in Illustrator and each element separated out for animating.

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Emma - Mall Scene & Bestie Design In this case I was given background (done in a 3d program). I just drew in the cupboard with the dishes and the bird. I also Illustrated some dishes in Illustrator.

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Emma - Dishes and Props Emma - Classroom Scene Emma - Bedroom James - Office Scene James - Boardroom Scene James - Hallway Scene Along with the background I was asked to draw the monitor in such a way that the animated image within would scroll without looking wonky. I did create a simplified version in colour of the company’s website but it appears that they decided to use another image for that portion.

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James - Home Office Scene George - Bedroom

The Monster Project 2019 / This Isn't Kansas

Rina Rozsas — Tue, 06 Aug 2019 01:13:10 +0000

A community undertaking where elementary students draw monsters and artists from around the world recreate them in their own style. These new versions are presented back to the kids in the hope that it encourages them to see where their imaginations and collaborations can lead them. It's such a wonderful project and I'm honored to have been a part of it this year.

The big reveal of 134 monster images happened today, August 5, 2019. Check out all the amazing contributions at The Monster Project and please consider supporting it by purchasing a book.

Below is my contribution and progression along with my chosen student’s work that inspired it all.

I tried my best to be faithful to the original drawing and colours. When I saw the speech bubble, I felt it might work well looking like it belonged in a comic book. This young artist sure has a great imagination! I hope she continues to create and come up with fantastic stories.

Update: I've been told that my artwork has been selected to be included in the 2019 Monster Project Art Book. With the amount of submissions, there were no guarantees so this was a nice surprise. I’m very much looking forward to receiving my copy.

Recent Studies, Recent Art

Rina Rozsas — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 22:17:02 +0000

Sorry for the lack of blog updates these past months! I decided early this year to focus my efforts on learning and creating more artwork to add to my portfolio, stores and Instagram pages. I’ve also been helping out an animator with an informational video on a tight deadline. I’ll talk more about that in an upcoming post.

In order to produce more personal work, I began to set some time limits for myself for each piece and, as a result, I became much more efficient and produced more work in a few months than I did in an entire year. I realized a lot of what slowed me down in the past was overthinking things. Don’t get me wrong, I occasionally still do but I’ve been trying my best to push past it. I totally get that ubiquitous t-shirt phrase, Don’t Overthink It.

Letting go to draw whatever came to mind and trying out whatever style was also very freeing—I was coming up with ideas far more often. Too often, sometimes, but that’s a good thing, right? My main struggle these days is I have trouble trying to stick to a single subject matter and style because I love to explore. It would be nice to be recognized for my style. I’m not sure if I have one yet. Maybe one day.

Because I’m constantly trying to increase my knowledge of technique, I followed some tips I picked up from my Schoolism classes and I started to do more light studies, studies of animals, action poses and backgrounds. I began to notice improvement to my finished pieces which I’ll save for another post. I felt like I was able to produce them a little more easily than I had in the past. Although I was pleased at how some of them turned out I know there will always be room for growth. I did start to think: Wow, did I really do that? There was a time when I would make numerous studies and still feel like I wasn’t advancing. I was embarrassed to share them so often I didn’t. To me they weren’t good enough—I made the mistake of comparing myself to others. We are often hardest on ourselves, right? I’ve since changed my perspective and instead try to learn from those artists I admire. Below are some of the studies I’ve been doing this year.

Light Studies:

Light Study - Greyscale I decided to do a light study of one of the characters from my husband’s collection of Disney’s Infinity characters. I chose the Hulk because he’s nice and blocky which is great for this purpose. It was really challenging as I had to work quickly; natural light changes so fast. The last stage of light cleanup was from memory and I’m pretty sure I made lots of mistakes. Haha.

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Light Study - Colour Taken from a screenshot of DC’s Titans show. I really liked the lighting so did a study of Raven in this cool blue light. I could have continued on for a more polished look but in order to keep my momentum of getting more work out, I decided to leave this as is and move on to the next piece. I like it being a little unfinished though.

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Cool Light Study

Exploration of Shapes, Expressions and Line of Action :

I started off with some basic shapes in grey and characters started to emerge. Except for that first one that I saw while riding my stationery bike. I could see a face in the plastic contraption that holds my iPad in place on the bike handles so that shape became this creepy but fun character.

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Random Characters From Silhouettes Characters From Shapes Oh no you didn’t! A little disagreement between the hubby and I sparked this fun drawing. :) He said something and I responded with a quick doodle. He laughed when he saw it so I made a clean version of it. The two of us as chibi characters. Here I really tried to push the action. Of course, now I can see where I could have pushed it further.

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Kapow! Here I tried using that Line of Action to exaggerate the pose.

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Winter is Here - Rough Pencils Winter is Here - Flats For this piece, I was trying out a process I learned from an art class Sam Nielson taught called Lighting for Story and Concept Art. The process uses render pass where you separate out the key light, occlusions, etc. The hubby was kind enough to pose for me but I exaggerated his features, pose and body to give it a more comical feel. I love animation so this is sort of what I was leaning towards. I eyeballed the perspective so no ruler was brought out other than using the lasso tool.

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Winter is Here - Final

Landscape Studies From Photos and Paintings:

Cumulus Clouds Practice (Step 1) I did this exercise along with another in photoshop for practice painting big fluffy white clouds. I only noticed afterwards that I unintentionally painted in two faces that are not in the original photo. Can you spot them? The photo I referenced was by Haiwei Hu.

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Cumulus Clouds Practice (Step 2) I thought that I was referencing a photo only to later discover that it was a photo of painting by Renato Mucillo. I guess I can count this as a master painting study.

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Cumulus Clouds Practice 2

Animal Studies:

A study from Terryl Whitlatch’s class on cat anatomy. I drew the rig and simplified skeletons on the right from Terryl’s example but I incorporated my cat’s anatomy over her example at the bottom. I copied her musculature (3rd one) but added in the colour coding based on what I had learned.

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Cat Anatomy Study What better way to see the musculature than by studying a hairless cat.

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Hairless Cat Study This year, our two senior fur babies have started to experience some health issues so I’ve been a little obsessed about sketching them. It’s heartbreaking to know that our time with them is limited.

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Sketches of My Cat, Dax I took one of my pencil sketches of my cat, Dax, and dropped in some flats and vector lines.

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Tonkinese Cat Some quick skull studies — human vs cat. I’m learning to let go of wanting everything to look so clean all the time.

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Skull Comparison Study of a friend’s cat and mother.

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Kitty Portrait Some studies that I decided to make into a print and pattern.

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Studies of My Cat Poses of my cat, Dax, cleaned up and coloured.

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Cat Life One of many studies I did for a pet portrait. i know, who draws the back for a portrait, eh? I saw this photo and really liked the pose so had to draw it.

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Studies of a Weimaraner Study of a Weimaraner 2 Closeup of the work in progress.

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Mr. T. (WIP) Mr. T Pet Portrait Just playing around with one of the sketches I did of my cat. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. I may come back to it at a later date.

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A Cat Study I Took Further The Hubby and Our Two Cats

Thanks for looking!

Some Recent Commercial Work

Rina Rozsas — Sat, 13 Oct 2018 14:41:21 +0000

Thanks to a referral I recently got to work on an fun project producing vector art for a short animation. It was an educational video for a pharmaceutical company on the subject of leadership. One would think it would be a little dry but it actually turned out to be quite entertaining! It was a collaborative process involving a small creative team of people.

Due to confidentiality I won’t be able to share all of the assets (there was quite a number) nor the final video but I can share several final images, the iterative process, and even some of the rejected ideas. A few ideas were shelved, either because they were a little too playful, or didn’t serve the final message as well as others. Not all ideas end up getting used but it’s all part of the process on getting to that final stage.

Some Scenes Used in the Final Video:

Roughs of Some Approved Scenes:

Some of the thumbnail options Full-size rough First iteration of a scene Second iteration of a scene

Images and Ideas That Didn’t Make the Cut:

Dinosaurs, Raccoons and Cats, Oh My!

Rina Rozsas — Thu, 31 May 2018 05:00:00 +0000

I've been a little behind in my blog posts this year because I've been spending my time learning. In addition to reviewing some of my old Schoolism classes, I took on some new ones over at Skillshare. Some classes include designing patterns—one in Photoshop, the other in Illustrator. I'm still trying to decide which best fits my workflow but now I have more options. I always thought that some of my character designs might potentially work well either as patterns or standalone images on products. I'll let you be the judge! :)

Falling Falling - phone case Raccoons Love Raccoon Character Concepts Raccoons Love - flats Raccoon Love - more roughs Raccoons Love - initial sketch Come and Get It! The Cat Pack Yoikes! Raccoon Yoikes! Raccoon Greyscale Older Raccoon Character Concept

Illustrations for an Academic Manuscript

Rina Rozsas — Wed, 30 May 2018 12:20:05 +0000

Occasionally, I get a commission from an industry I wouldn't normally expect but I am always interested in learning from a new experience.

In this case, a friend was kind enough to recommend me to an assistant professor at a nearby university. She was looking to include some light-hearted illustrations to recap each of the sections of her tenure report on nursing, something I knew very little about. Working with an academic pushed me out of my comfort zone somewhat because I'm used to collaborating with someone who is also creative but this time I took on most of that responsibility while she provided all the expertise on the subject matter. She had never worked with an illustrator before so this was to be a new experience for the both of us.

Instead of a design brief I was given her report to read and see what images I could come up with. (Already outside that comfort zone!) Unfortunately, due to my limited knowledge of her field, some of my initial ideas didn't quite fit with what she had in mind so I had to do some additional research to be able to come up with something that would feel more sincere and believable. A lot of ideas were bounced back and forth before we narrowed it down to the following illustrations to accompany each of her sections. I think the collaboration went well.

Her Teaching Style

Instead of a conventional teaching image with a teacher at the head of the class pointing to a blackboard or diagram, she wanted to convey the collaborative nature of her teaching style with her nursing students. One such example was that she sometimes does what she calls 'silly demos', using muffins or pound cakes to illustrate different types of biopsies.

Road from Concept to Infographic

This was a tough one to finalize. She wanted images to express the journey to and from collaboration. In the end, a process map was the best way to show the concepts of education and leadership leading to collaboration, and collaboration potentially resulting in healthy living, a long life, and the funding of ideas or research.

Process Map: Final Version Cleaned Up Version 2 Rough Version 2 Rough Version 1

One-Panel Stories

For the topic of Service & Caring in her report, she had three areas she wanted a visual representation showing service to the communities:

Department: Committee Work and Planning;

Professional Communities: Nursing and Higher Education; and

University Faculty: Volunteering and Collegiality.

While brainstorming ideas, fond memories of Calvin and Hobbes came to mind and I created these little humorous vignettes using a little girl and her toy minions to act out the scenes. My client loved it!

This experience really reminded me how much I enjoy drawing cute characters and scenes. I've noticed that a lot of my sketches tend to either the cute or somewhat humorous. As an artist, I'm inspired by a lot of things and I often wish I could do everything under the sun but perhaps I will stop fighting that desire and just go with the flow. :)

Reviewing RedBubble with New Artwork

Rina Rozsas — Sun, 18 Feb 2018 22:03:19 +0000

As an independent artist there are many venues that do print-on-demand so it's hard to vet them all. However, having heard good things about RedBubble from fellow artist friends, I decided to try them out. I'm happy to share that I've added them to the list of stores that sell my artwork. Recently, I added some new artwork featuring a re-designed version of a Chow Chow character. I created it a while back for a friend's comic pitch that unfortunately didn't make the cut for an anthology. I felt it was a shame to shelve the character so I decided to take another crack at "Gordon" to see if I could push his design further and make him more adorable. I'm all about the cute these days and feel like it's a direction I want to keep going in, at least for now.

I ordered some things from both my RedBubble and Society6 stores using the same design in order to compare the quality, colour accuracy and speed of delivery.

My First Impression of RedBubble:

RedBubble performed better than my other store, Society6, when it came to delivery time but for Canadians I think there may be a bias. RedBubble has a location in Burlington, Ontario and I'm in nearby Toronto. Society6 ships from the US so there will always be a delay at the border. I think customers in the US would get comparable delivery speeds because RedBubble also has a American location.

I was already impressed with getting my packages quickly—within 5 days—along with a follow-up email to confirm delivery but it didn't end there. All of items from RedBubble arrived together. The packaging was also really well-designed and my mug was even safely nestled in a sleeve within the outer package. I don't know how many times I've received things from other vendors where items arrived bent or broken so this was nice to see. You can tell they put a lot of thought and care into it. Their attention to details—a tiny wooden clothes peg holding the tee-shirt tag, overall product quality, colour consistency amongst the products, and printing accuracy—helped make a really good first impression. I'm quite happy I tried them out.

The packaging The product My new favourite mug! The sticker

Society6

My Society6 items arrived separately (because they use different fulfillment vendors) and took much longer, likely due to clearing customs. While Society6 provides tracking while in transit in the US, they don't extend that after it reaches Canada so that's something I'd like to see improved. Most items took about 2 weeks to arrive but the notebook ended up taking over 3 weeks! I had just sent in a request for a replacement, fearing it had been lost, when it finally arrived. Doh! One thing I will say is that their return/refund system is quite smooth and painless. Their customer service response is pretty good; I waited less than 24 hours.

Because Society6 uses different vendors I believe that's why the colour wasn't consistent from product to product. For instance, although the travel mug (on the left, in the second image below) looked good it was a lot more yellow than I would have liked. The hubby and I were split on which stickers we preferred, the glossy Society6 stickers or the RedBubble matte treatment. Both were of very good quality. Time will tell as to which one is more durable. The notebook turned out nicely. The paper has a nice smooth texture similar to 28-lb bond paper. I can foresee filling it up with lots and lots of drawings!

Stickers Travel mug compared to RedBubble products 6" x 8" notebook Wraparound printing is nice Also available with ruled paper

The Re-design

And lastly, some of the sketches leading up to the revised design of Gordon.

The original sketch Gordon progression Working out the pose. A few design elements

2017 Year-in-Review

Rina Rozsas — Tue, 02 Jan 2018 23:00:13 +0000

I'm not usually one to write these types of things. Every year has both its good and bad days, challenges and learning experiences but I considered 2017 to be a pretty good year for the hubby and I. I'll highlight some of the reasons below:

A Creative Collaboration:

At the end of last year, my husband and came up with a little creative endeavour for the both of us to work on (a small app). While I worked on fleshing out the characters at the beginning of 2017, we started to see a bigger potential for it and being the crazy creatives we are, imagined all kinds of things it could transition into. Based on the characters' expressions, we started to see their personalities emerge and my husband ended up coming up with the characters' names, backgrounds and motivations with the possibility of later creating a story with them in it. Although I have illustrated stories for others, neither of us had had much experience writing our own but we thought it would be a good opportunity to put some of the things we've learned over the past few years to use.

I had managed to get most of the characters cleaned up and in various poses when paying client gigs came in and we had to put it and other personal projects on hold. My husband is a web developer which tends to be all-encompassing and, when I get deadlines, I tend to brush everything else off to focus on that. Because work kept coming in, the project had to sit on the back-burner.

Client Work:

Client work came from a variety of industries which pushed me to learn new things quickly to be able to meet my deadlines. I had a lot of new experiences: I ended up pencilling and inking a comic cover to be coloured by another artist; I did my first-ever full-colour comic work, from pencils to colours and lettering; I designed a banner to promote a book I worked on, and a YouTube still for a musician I know; I collaborated with an art director from an ad agency on a few projects including spot illustrations, package label, and logo. It felt a little surreal getting all these requests because, due to lack of time, I had distanced myself from social media. I'm still not sure which was the cause and which was the effect!

One of the projects I collaborated on with an art director went through a number of iterations before a final image was chosen. It started off as a relatively simple cartoon likeness of the client but they ended up wanting to push it further into the realm of caricature. Unfortunately, I can't show the final image but you can see some of the iterations. This process opened my eyes to the nuances of what art directors and clients might ask for.

Things I learned:

Even with client work, I made a point of trying to keep up with my online Schoolism classes, albeit at a slower pace. I learned a lot of useful tips that I plan to apply to the latter half of our project. While I didn't have much time to do the homework, I did watch and absorb a few online courses. I love how it gives me a new perspective about art and the many ways to approach it. Hearing other artists share their experiences, backgrounds and tips, has made me feel less stressed about my own art and more excited about the future and possibilities. This was a huge revelation for me because I've always been a little too critical about my work which sometimes tends to hold me back. I'm learning that everyone has their own creative process and style so I need to not be so hard on myself.

I learned a great many things that contributed to my feeling much happier in 2017. I learned that it's not necessary to compare myself with others but to embrace the things I do well as an artist. That doesn't mean I will stop trying to push myself or evolving. I learned that limiting my exposure to social media made me less stressed and distracted. I learned not to worry too much about what others think and to instead focus on my work and projects; there will always be people that like what you do. I also learned a little about legal contracts and picked up copies of Graphic Artists Guild Handbook: Pricing and Ethical Guidelines and Business and Legal Forms for Illustrators.

Thanks for all the support and here's to a healthy and prosperous 2018 to you all!