[The views expressed on this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Art League.]
It’s time for month two of my Art League of Long Island residency! This month, I’ve continued my classes in watercolor and sculpting, and took my friend Jay Stuart‘s Graphic Novel class. (Before we get started, sorry for any images that are wonky – click them and then click ‘view full size’ to see them properly.)
Classical Figure Sculpture
Work continues on my clay sculpture based on idealized classical figure proportions. Lots of tweaking – finally got to starting the feet and head last time. Arms will come soon, I think.
day 3 
day 3 
day 4 
day 4 
day 4
Fearless Watercolor
My first class doing the assignment with everyone 
The teacher’s version
I was planning on updating this for tonight’s class, but turns out it was cancelled haha. Sadly only got to do one watercolor class this month, but it was still satisfying to revisit this medium. I feel like I need to work on controlling not necessarily what the paints do, but controlling myself from overworking stuff. Hopefully this class can help me figure out that balance so I can do some personal work in watercolor.
Graphic Novels
For Jay’s first class, he was late, but his assistant asked us to draw our characters in their environments so he could see our drawing ability. Jay’s my friend, so I mostly just doodled around, and I drew space cause I was lazy haha.
That night, Jay gave us an assignment to design a story and do storyboards based on three locations – a zeppelin, a cafe, and a lab. I never finished it, but I made my story about two oblivious scientists who live above a city they are banned from. This city is constantly in danger (like monsters or something), so they constantly make it worse by sending their scientific solutions from the sky. (A cute idea – I really should finish it.)
I didn’t give myself enough time to draw the head 
For the second class, we warmed-up with short poses by Jay’s assistant. This class’s assignment was to draw a character in a situation and make a frame to place it in – based on what Jay does for his own picture books. I just did a silly interpretation of it, with a cartoon with a gilded frame in a fancy gallery setting. I’ve always liked gilded frames, but as you can see, I’m still not finished with it haha. I think I’m gonna have to use some tracing paper for that one.
Jay also brought in lots of supplies to show the students.
Click to see it in the right direction – sorry
For the final class, I was late and missed the warm-ups. But Jay spent the class mostly talking about the final process of how he makes books and events he sells them at. And for the assignment, he wanted us to do a comic based on a story he provided, which can be seen in the second photo of this Instagram post. I had a blast doing this (and making it silly), and it’s interesting to see what I can manage in about an hour of class time.
Overall, I very much enjoyed taking Jay’s class and seeing what he had to share with his students. Illustration and comics are my professional realm, so a lot of it was just refreshers for me, but it’s always good to get some new perspective from a professional peer. While I’m quite experienced in illustrating, production and selling at events, the number one thing I got out of Jay’s course was practice on my narrative skills. Comics were my dream job as a kid and are still a passion of mine, but my narrative skills are very much lacking. Thanks for the push, Jay.
Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this month – I’m not sure what I’ll have to share for next month because I’m running around crazy getting ready to sell at conventions three weekends in a row. And after that, us resident artists have our artist chat on the 22nd, so mark that on your calendar! Then I’m gonna pass out for a week straight!
If you wanna keep up with what I’m doing with ALLI during the next month, check out my story highlight about it on Instagram!
