Light and Color at the Sierra Nevada Pastel Painting Workshop

These are some of my pastel plein air paintings I did during my trip to the Sierra Nevada, I love going to this workshop,  It has become like a tradition of some sort. A very nice getaway, you get to experience nature and paint all day long, plus you get to learn so much stuff, what else do you need? This workshop is taught by the master of pastel plein air paintings himself, Mr. Bill Cone. Such an amazing trip with some wonderful folks that I am lucky enough to call my friends.

                                                           

      On top of Upper Sardine Lake 

pastel on paper

 

   

Meadow 

pastel on paper 

The Sierra Buttes

Love Falls

pastel on canson paper

Feliz Dia del Niño

Back in my home country, Mexico, we celebrate children's day on April 30, so I made this very quick and loose illustration to congratulate all my family and friends who are still kids at heart.

My Little Cousin's Belated Birthday Card

Yesterday I failed miserably to wish my little cousin a happy birthday, so I wanted to redeem myself by making her a quick sketch of herself, she loves when I draw stuff, so here it is. I hope she likes it and forgives me.

Classroom Props and Rough Composition

Environment and Backgrounds

So after having my characters figured out, I then move on to start thinking, planning and designing the world in which the characters that I created would inhabit. I started out sketching my ideas in pencil, very rough and after that I started making small thumbnail roughs to understand, get the basic composition and get the placement of the objects in it, as well as many options to choose from and decide the one that best reads and makes the audience interested in. I will refine the design and work on the stylization when i blow the drawing up and ink it.  After looking at these small rough thumbnails #3 is the one I was looking for.

Practice Sketches

These are some charcoal life drawings and the last one a digital drawing using a photo reference. These are just sketches I did to practice and just let my mind rest from the ongoing projects I've been working on.

Character Design Process

After finally finding the character designs for the characters in the story, now I start to think how would they act, what would they personalities be like. In this stage I am still cleaning up my character designs, fixing them, tweaking here and there, editing, to make them the best they can be.

This is the first character line-up I came up with

After looking at the characters and receiving some advice from one great teacher I saw that I could push these characters a little bit more. Also they look like if they were kindergartners, and in this story they are in elementary school, so I needed to age them a bit.

I did some more sketches to find the right poses that would bring out their personality with a good design involved.

These are some of the quick sketches I did

After these sketches I saw what i liked, what i could take from the previous line-up and implement it to this set of new ones and I was confident enough to bring them to a final, completed sketch.

Now with this last set of characters I was really happy how they came out, you can really tell which one is which in this line-up. You can see the smooth/coolness of Mike, the arrogant, superficial, beautiful Lucy and the adorable, goofy, nerd, simple Simon.

Some Process shots:

Final Line-up