Janelle WIP part 2

So I think I got the hair to look pretty neat so far, probably going to still mess around with it, but I think its time to coloring and tweaking the face. I already know I'm probably going to redo her nose and probably do something new to the eyes.

Here's my progress:

Janelle Monae WIP

Ok, here's some progress on my Janelle Monae picture. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how I'm going to tackle her hair. It look alright, but still a lot to do. Decided to play around with gradients and clipping masks to get the look I want.

Primetime WIP

I've decided to get back to work getting better at animation and illustrations this year. I'm working on an animation project as well as this one.

I'm a really big fan of Janelle Monae, I went to see her in concert late last year and it was a blast. Her music inspires me so much, and I find myself drawing little pictures of her in my sketch book sometimes. This project started as doodles I drew while watching her video for "Primetime". 

Here's the sketches:

And here's the line art for the second on so far:

I'm going to color this work with a few new things that I've been trying to learn. I think it will turn out great.

Progress on Daniel Tiger Character

So last month was very busy, I've been working a lot lately and when I haven't been working I've been resting or spending time with my family and friends. As a result I didn't get too much done on my two projects. I was off today so I decided to get back to work on them. I worked on the Daniel Tiger character today since I was still in the beginning stages of it, so it was easier to continue working on.

I got a lot of work done on his face. For the longest time I had trouble with getting the details of the face, especially the head the way I wanted it to look. In the show many of the characters have curved lines around their heads and I wanted to replicate that, but I didn't know how. I played around a bit in illustrator and I finally found a way that isn't so hard to do. I created a shape with the pen tool and added a ton of anchor points around it. When I got the number of points I wanted I did effect
Right now I'm still messing around the with face patterns and the fur texture I picked out. I'm not quite satisfied with it yet, but its off to a good start:

Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood Inspired Character

 Last weekend while hanging out with my boyfriend we started watching PBS because we were bored, a show called "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood" was on. I thought the show was really cute, but what really caught my eye was the design of the characters:

I really like the different textures and the other little details like the lines of their eyes and mouths. I got inspired to make my own little character that could fit into that world:

My idea is a little ferret that is into playing sports. I want to take him into illustrator and color him in the same way. This project should be interesting. I'm already seeing a lot of things I'll have to do like finding or creating fur like textures and using the mesh tool and gradients a lot. I've done a character similar to that style before in flash, but I'm going to use illustrator since it should be better for this project.

I'll post updates on him as I work on it!

So much to learn, so little time

So its been "New Media Week" at my school and I've been going to a lot of lectures from animation professionals and I've just been so pumped to learn new stuff. Only problem is I'm already swamped with what I'm already learning in my classes. I've decided to start learning how to use Flash, Ilustrator, and Photoshop better.

I try to learn things online, but I think I do better with books and visual aids. Does anyone have any suggestions?