Hello! I'm Jacque Armijo, an artist and illustrator in Toronto, Canada. I'm at a stage where I feel comfortable with my skill level at art/drawing, but I still haven't carved out my own style - which is why I'm taking this class! I'm also a huge fan of the podcast, and ended up discovering it through Lisa Congdon's book "Find your Artistic Voice" late last year. It kinda feels like I'm coming full circle! Anyway, hope you enjoy seeing my progress throughout the class.

 

Exercise 1 & 2

If you want to check out my pinterest boards for this class, you can see them here. Below is how I dissected some of the things from my "taste" board and organized my thoughts on them. I made sure to include taste from when I was a kid, as made clear by Beanie Babies and Nickelodeon. My big themes ended up being: colour, dreamy, story, cute, funny, and diversity. Other notables were music, nature, and "cool". So the goal is to find a style that employs all of those things... right? 

 

Exercise 3

I don't have a printer at home so I had to make my own dice. I also kind of misunderstood the premise of this exercise - I thought we had to roll the dice 3 times, make something from those combinations, and then make a final combination of all three. So that's what I did.

Roll #1 was "Self Portrait" and "Guilty Pleasure". I chose Sex and the City as my guilty pleasure, and went about looking for some screenshots from the show. I found this one and decided to turn it into a crude sketch

Roll #2 was "Other Medium" and "Happy Accidents". This one seemed kind of paradoxical to me because, well, how am I supposed to employ my happy accidents to another medium? I don't know, it just didn't make sense to me, so I didn't sketch anything and decided to use this one towards the final combination.

Roll #3 was "6-year-old Tattoo" and "Slice of Life". At the age of 6, I was into anything with nature and Disney movies. I think I would have liked the caterpillar from Alice and Wonderland as a tattoo, and the idea now doesn't sound so bad, so I went with that. I've also been biking a lot, so that was my slice of life moment.

Like I said, I thought we had to combine all three ideas - so for "other medium" I decided to take a painted collage approach. I painted each piece separately, cut them out, and then arranged them on a background. During the development of the idea, I switched her lighting a cigarette to leaning on a bike, to leaning on a motorcycle in order to sell the idea of her being "too old". The final character ends up being a mashup of me, Alice, and Carrie from Sex and the City.

 

Exercise 4 "Populate Your World"

These were done in the Procreate app on the iPad.