This week, in Mike Lowery’s Getting Paid to Draw, we worked on creating icons based on topics that interested us. Icons are smaller than spot illustrations, quick to knock out, and surprisingly satisfying to complete. My topic was Farts.

Farts are occasionally loud, sometimes smelly, but always funny to someone. It’s a fact. Anyway, I started with some rough sketches, which I forgot to photograph,

but after that, I scanned them in and started using Affinity Photo to manipulate their placement and add color. I like using Affinity Photo over Photoshop these days; it feels less clunky and more engaging. There is an amazing feature that I exploited during the process of creating this project: if you go to Filters>Colors>Erase White Paper, only your drawn lines will be present. Fantastic! Hope you laugh for a while. Ciao!

After the first week of Mike Lowery’s Getting Paid to Draw, I am feeling a bit overwhelmed, but also a tiny bit more put together. Our first assignment was to make two different lists: things we are interested in and things that we know how to draw. I make lists of all of the things I plan on doing in the future and try my best to adhere to my guidelines as I make small amounts of progress; I was able to write these lists swiftly.

Once I completed these lists I fantasized about my dream client. Who would I like to work with when I grow up? My first choices would be the plethora of book publishers that I love, like Penguin, Scholastic, Harper Collins, but also some indie publishing companies as well. I think that my style lends itself to narrative storytelling more than any other category, but I can bend anything to fit my style of drawing. The final BONUS assignment was to draw something like a self portrait. 

I love working in pencil. Ticonderoga pencils are perhaps more important to me than the majority of my art supplies. I sharpen them until I reach the ferrule. after that, I remove the ferrule and super glue the last of the pencil to a new donor.  

There is so much emotion that can be put into a grey scale drawing. I love working in color, but there is a certain anxiety in choosing the proper color scheme for the story. I will start to get into using color more as the class continues. For now, back to the drawing board!

My name is Andrew Dylan Campbell and I am an illustrator…or at least that is what I want to be. By day I am an art teacher, which is where I do a lot of my research and take notes/make sketches for all of the projects I have rummaging around in my head. By night I am a dad. Somewhere in there I would like to fit in being an illustrator as well. In order to make that happen I have enrolled in a class called Getting Paid to Draw, which is taught my Mike Lowery, a fantastic and very well established professional illustrator.

Over the next few weeks I will try to share some of the progress I hope to make and, for anybody who is interested, provide some insight into how I plan on making the practice of illustration a more prominent feature in my life. I am also going to share some of the things I find interesting, talk about some of the art materials I use and whatever comes to mind. I think this will be all for now, but I will try to write more soon. Have a great day!