Progress Report

After a bit of a sputtering start, I'm going great guns illustrating "Little Old Adam Mantooth". I wasn't quite prepared for the amount of work it took to simply choose what medium to use. I went from working with pen and ink with water color, to markers and Dr. Martin's colored ink. I finally decided on painting it with Gouache. I love all those old Little Golden Book illustrations from the 40's and 50's. I'm hoping the end result will have that classic look.

During the week, I've got about 2.5 hours to work before I go to bed. Gotta get the kids off to daycare and school, then it's off to work. where I spend much of the day impatiently waiting to paint again. Here's what's on my table now.

This mess works for me. I know exactly where everything is. I could clean it up but it would look like this again in a couple of days. I am slob.

This is a pile of false starts, practices, and pencils . When I paint, I do all the drawing on tracing paper on top of the board. That way I can change the layout if I want. If I like what I've drawn, I'll flip the tracing paper over and trace the image on the reverse side with a soft leaded pencil. Then flip the tracing paper over to the original side and trace it for a second time on to the illustration board. When you're painting with a transparent medium, you can't really afford to do a lot of erasing on the board because if you chew up the paper your going to paint on with your eraser, it's going to look like hell. So I do all my erasing on the tracing paper with a kneadable eraser.

I'll be posting some illustrations as I finish them. Maybe some layouts and sketches. The blog will serve as a progress report. So check back in a couple of weeks.

This is the New Stuff

This is what I had in mind for inking and coloring the antagonist in my story. This was quickly scanned without messing with the hues or contrast or anything. Just a mock up to see what it would look like.

Designing Stage

I've written my first children's book. Now for the fun part!

Lookie Here!

Here's a job I did for the state to promote gun control. NO! No, no, no. Recycling! It's all about recycling people! So do it! I DO IT! Bye-bye.

Expensive Box of Crayons

Trying out new techniques with painting in Photoshop. I don't mind the fact that it looks like it was colored on the computer. But I want my paints to look like they were kind of slapped together. Almost hastily.

Lord of the Mechanical!

Here's a nifty piece of art I did in all it's stages. This guy's name is Hank Hazzard, and he just swiped this robot from an evil genius. I wonder what he'll do with it?

Grumpy Frump & Pickle Puss

Here's a collage from this weekend. I never have any idea what I'm going to do when I do one. It's like improv jazz. Not as nice to listen to though.

Goofing around with gray markers.