These are traditional illustrations I created on hotpress watercolor board in black watercolor in the fall of 2013 for my Illustration I class at University of Central Oklahoma. The top one is a fictional scene from a child's bedtime story. The assignment was to take a single sentence and turn it into an illustration of that sentence. Mine was, "The room was silent as he made his way to the podium." I originally wanted to illustrate Mark Twain, but my professor overruled me, so I anthropomorphized an owl and made the spectators other anthropomorphized animals.
The second illustration is from an assignment titled "A Walk Through The Forest," in which we went through a guided meditation. The scene actually incorporates a setting I remember from my early childhood in Keeseville, New York. Only the lake is fictional. The mountains and highway in the background actually exist.