The Illuminators' Workshop

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Nephite Costumes

I've always struggled with costume, largely because of a lack of knowledge/ visual library to pull from. However, this semester I'm taking a history of costume class at BYU, and it's helping a ton. It's amazing how, while technique is important, so much of art and creativity is just about having something in your imagination to pull from. I'm a big advocate of not only educating your hands and technical skills, but educating your imagination. Study outside fields and dabble constantly in new visual material, so that you always have fresh ideas.

These characters are intended to be Nephites from the Book of Mormon. As we don't know exactly where they lived or what their clothes looked like, I've based their clothes on a combination of Greek, Middle-Eastern, and Argentinian ideas. Not that these cultures would have had a particular influence on the Nephites, it just felt like a believable look.

Monday, June 18, 2012

Bandit at Sebus

This was kind of a fun sketch I left out of the hiatus post yesterday. It's one of the bandits attacking Ammon at the waters of sebus (the original story can be found in Alma 17 through about 21). He's got these kind of interesting "nunchuck-axe" things going . . . lol

Sunday, June 17, 2012

Creativity: A Face of Spirituality

I was doing some research for the resources section, and I came across this great "Mormon Messages" clip. It's cut from The Apostle Elder Uchtdorf's address in the General Relief Society meeting in October 2008. Though adressed to the audience of a womens' organization, I feel that these thoughts apply to all of God's children. You can check out more inspirational videos from Mormon Messages at link :)

Dust-Speak Returns

Dust-Speak is officially back, Jack :)

Some time ago, I decided to move all of my gospel art work to deviantart (link), because I felt I would have a bigger impact there. While currently my artwork reaches many more people on the DA than it ever did on this blog, it tends to be mixed with my other artwork, and I don't feel that it accomplishes some of the aims I had in starting this blog in the first place. So; while I fully intend to continue using Deviantart and participating in the LDS community there, Dust-Speak is officially back. I feel like it helps me maintan more of a focus on gospel related art, and encourages me to contribute to the community more, ie by consistently doing Wikipedia Illustrations and creating tutorials/ resources for gospel artists.

Here's some catchup work from the hiatus:

"Helaman 5: Rock of Fire, Shield of Faith"

(Click for description)