William Low and the Ellis Island Challenges

I'm taking a class with William Low, an Illustrator from B-B-Bronx, NY. He illustrates a lot of children books, but he also does other paintings. Most of them revolve around New York City. I wouldn't blame him. NYC is pretty happening. Sometimes.

This past Tuesday, my class, painstakingly called, "Special Projects in Art: Ellis Island," was to boat over to the historic isle and research anything about the island for the second assignment for the course. The second assignment being in traditional media (oil: classic or watermix).

By the way, this is my first assignment for the class, which was to be completed through a Photoshop painting method. While, I'm not necessarily a stranger to the Adobe program, I definitely learned more than I expected when it comes to painting digitally.

Side by side, we were to select one of the references Low recorded himself (I think) and use a part or the whole reference to develop a painting. It's not bad, I think. Some parts could be improved. Just the water, ambiguous objects in the background, desaturating the greens, shadows---things like that.

Or everything.

Back to the story!

On Tuesday, we were to go to Ellis Island. We got there, on time for the last ferry to the island, but for some reason, almost everyone brought their X-acto knives. And for some reason, Ellis Island/Liberty Island security is tougher than most airports'. So everyone in the group missed the last boat that day.

(I think I would go into more detail, it was really funny and exciting, but it's nearly 5am, and I'm trying my best to avoid typos.)

I was able to go yesterday (Saturday), and before the museum closed, I managed to sketch out something in the inside cover of my Ellis Island Sketchbook:

It's a neat opener to the book, I think. I hope to finish the drawing of the luggage sometime soon.

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William Low - http://www.williamlow.com/index.html

Ellis Island - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island

X-ACTO - http://www.xacto.com/Catalog/Knives/Knives