MG Children's Book Illustrations

Teen Chapter Book Cover Design: Seven

2012-02-06T12:12:00.000-08:00

Thumbnail sketches
rough sketch
revised dog
final drawing and color samples
final illustration
Final internal graphite illustrations

This is the final post in a series of blog posts describing and showing my process for creating the cover and internal illustrations for my newest teen chapter book, "The Silver Shuttle" by Jennifer Fell Hayes. The book has been available on Amazon for about a month now and I finally got to see some copies of the book in person. I'm sooooo happy with the final product!

         The book is about a teen girl who gets news that her parents bought a new home for her to come home to on summer break. In the process of discovering all of the secrets and hidden history the old house has to reveal, she is caught up in an adventure in which the world around her depends on her bravery and persistence to avoid losing all that is good to the powers of darkness. She is set on a task to retrieve various objects and return them to their rightful owners, the bearers of light. In the course of this task she learns all about various abbeys throughout England and is caught up in various historical events jumping in and out of her own time. She is faced with immense challenges and foes that would make even the fiercest of heroes weak with fright. The powers of light enable her to hold strong in the face of it all.

     I think a part of why I enjoyed illustrating this book so much is because I really enjoyed the story and feel the author does an amazing job of painting the scenes for us. Really the illustrations only work as a backdrop to the authors magnificent story telling ability.
        It's rare for me to have the opportunity to paint and draw such engaging and action packed subjects and to actually have a large amount of time devoted to one image. I enjoyed all of my projects but this one was particularly challenging and I was also given much more freedom in the process than is typical. The author and publisher basically loved everything I sent them and I had to keep pushing myself to the next level with each step, improving on the dog, improving on the birds and the girl and really pushing myself to do my best. Of course I had the benefit of their opinions and ideas as well, but it was more respectful than I sometimes encounter.

Sometimes clients push a bit too much as they are trying to get me to illustrate exactly what they perceive to be in their own minds eye (which of course evolves as i try to capture it), that can sometimes stifle my voice as an artist and can be frustrating if they in fact are unable to describe or show what they are talking about. Understand it's not that I feel smarter or more creative than my clients but I do at least spend hours and hours sitting and thinking over various options for an image and looking at hundreds of photo references. I know my work process and capabilities and can picture what my own idea might look like in the final art. Whereas a client might spend all day working at their normal job, come home sit in front of their computer think of an idea immediately and think it's the coolest thing since the invention of Doritos just because they thought of it. I've learned over the years that generally a "first" idea is overused and stereotypical. It can take an extra ten or so hours of work just doing revision after revision trying to make it look like what they have in mind. They don't want me to be an artist, they just want me to act as a sort of printer, printing out the contents of their own mind onto canvas.

In the end I usually love the final art with every client I've worked for because I do my best to have a give and take relationship with the client hoping for an end result we will both love, as well as all those who view the work. No matter what the idea is, i will try to do my best to illustrate it and make the end result look cool. They are paying for the art so if they are particularly persistent on a point I don't agree with, I will indeed let them have final say (providing it's not immoral or indecent of course). Many of my clients have fantastic ideas and do an excellent job of voicing their opinions and ideas in a way i can interpret and create. In the case of this book, I was simply overjoyed with the process and couldn't be happier with the final result. I hope to one day work with this author again!

I showed pretty much everything for my process work on this cover illustration except for the stages of my final illustration. So that is shown below. I started off with the final drawing printed onto a heavy duty illustration paper and coated with a few layers of acrylic clear medium to protect the drawing from smudging from the paint. I then did a quick acrylic under layer to cover all of the white with paint. In this case i left the lightest areas of the image untouched, the face in particular so i wouldn't lose the tiny detail lines. Then I put more accurate colors filling in all the various areas working all over the canvas striving for color Harmony.

In many cases i would pre-mix colors in batches and then use colors from the sky mixed with other colors to make the sand or rocks. This helps to lock everything together rather than grabbing for fresh tube colors with each element int he image. In general I would work from background to foreground, dark to light, larger masses to smaller masses getting more and more detailed as I go. The only way to have consistent rounded circular pattern int eh sky was to paint over the birds and redraw them with the brush. The tape in step three across the horizon is there to create a straight edge along the water line.

"A Cloudy Day" : Part Three

2012-02-02T06:49:00.000-08:00

So this is a book I've been working on for the past four months or so. In my last post I expected to have the illustrations practically done in two more weeks. I sent the client all of the images as they were at that time. They all had skies colored as in the image below.

The client didn't like the skies. So I spent the past couple of weeks repainting the skies throughout the whole book. The color sample stage is designed specifically to avoid going through this sort of thing. But it doesn't always work that way.
Two weeks later and I do now have approval on the images so far. Lot's more to do but I can now see the end in sight. I've now started work on my next children's book "Pigs under the Post Office" and will soon be starting work on my second chapter book in the "Samantha" series with Daisy Griffin. YEah!!!!! I should also finally be finishing off the BBQ logo this month. With a bunch of other potential projects floating on the horizon.

BBQ Logo Design:Two, Tangent Points

2012-01-18T17:21:00.000-08:00

For the first post in this series click HERE

It's been a while since the first post for this series as the client got really busy over the holidays and needed more time to respond than normal. Well they have now responded, so I was able to do a near final drawing. We've improved on many areas since the first drafts.
Sometimes I get a bit ahead of myself and do the final drawing before the sketch is really ready for it. I think that happened a bit with this image. A couple days after finishing the line drawing I realized there are some unnecessary tangent points in the image that draw too much attention. I think the one that gets the most on my nerves is where the VT shaped stake just barely touches his rolled up sleeve. So I will likely adjust them in the drawing or in the final illustration. I also noticed the pupils are different sizes and I'm not quit happy with the lines yet as there isn't a good pattern of thick and thin. Those will be easy to fix in the final art.

The red circles indicate some of the tangent points in the image. In general it's a good idea to try and eliminate tangent points like these as they can be a bit confusing. It's best to overlap shapes to help show what's in foreground and what's in the background and so there is no confusion as to where on abjects stops and another starts.

"A Cloudy Day" book Illustrations in Progress

2012-01-14T08:12:00.000-08:00

I typically don't enjoy showing in progress work unless I'm able to show the finished product along with it but today I just felt like making an exception. These are still far from being done and are mostly in the under painting stage. everything is still pretty dark right now as acrylics usually work from dark to light. An interesting fact for folks who live in this part of Vermont, the rolling hills in these images were inspired by Darling Hill Rd. I knew i wanted to give off the feeling that the characters are on a roller coaster ride to add fun to the story and Darling Hill Rd. gives that feeling perfectly. The last image actually features a particular mountain that I'm sure some will recognize when I show the final art. You might need to right click and chose to view in a separate window to see them a bit better. Not sure why blogger recently made it harder to enlarge images.
Next week will be a huge leap from these rough under paintings to having 90% of the illustrations finished! Then probably one more week of doing fine detail work with the figures and faces.

As a reminder here's a shot of all the images in the final drawing stage.

I did some rough samples of the faces and the clouds too so the client would be able to get a feel for how those would be painted in the finals. Clients usually get a bit jumpy during the color sample and rough painting stage so it helps to have something a bit closer to a finished look for them to look at while waiting. the quarter and dime indicate the actual sizes I will be painting the original painted faces at. Luckily a few are much bigger to help add interest to the characters and really be able to see into their eyes. This story is just as much about the clouds as it is about the kids so we move the focus back and forth between them a bit.

Cobblestone Magazine Illustrations: The Blizzard of 1888

2012-01-13T18:43:00.000-08:00

This past month I was contacted by the art director for Cobblestone Magazine to do three illustrations for their March issue! This was a HUGE deal for me since in over four years of my full time professional illustration career this is the first time I was contacted by a brick and mortar publisher. I've had a ton of great projects with excellent clients over the years. However it has always been a goal of mine to eventually work for brick and mortar publishers as that is really the only possible way for me to stay in business long term. The art directors with Cobblestone were a pleasure to work with and they Loved the final illustrations. They didn't ask for any changes to the sketches or the final artwork!! So looking forward to working with them again if I ever have the chance. Get a copy of the march issue when it's available!

This first two page spread illustration depicts the School children's blizzard in 1888.

I originally expected all of these illustrations to be simple as most of the image would be snow. I soon realized the complexities involved with any historical illustration. I had to research the style of clothing, what the haystacks looked like at that time period, and then one of the hardest aspects ended up being in how to depict a blinding snow and yet not have it overtake the image entirely, as we do still want to see the action. I ended up painting the entire image normally and then lost a lot of that detail once I started adding the snow with a fan brush. I had to resist the urge to paint mountains into the image since this story takes place out on the prairie. Placing eight people into a tight composition with lots of text and a gutter was a whole nother challenge.

The image above tells the story of one group of children and their teacher who survived the storm due to the quick thinking of one father. Many kids tried to walk home that day in the storm and died. But in this case a father fought his way to the school and told the teacher to keep the kids there for the night. They all survived as a result. For this image I researched one room school houses, stoves of the period, clothing, and I kept trying to figure out what sorts of colors might be used in the clothing back then. All the pictures are of course black and white and generally very poor quality so a large part of this project I had to use my imagination along with informed decisions.

This last illustration depicts another blizzard that took place a little later that same year only this time it effected eastern cities. I found out that this storm is one of the main reason eastern cities decided to push to have all water, electric and even trolley transportation moved underground when they realized how a storm like this could easily put these things out of commission for a while. I researched building styles, street lamps, trolleys, carriages, and even the telegraph poles. The storm dumped up to fifty inches of snow in some areas and Snow drifts reached up to the second stories of buildings.

Beauty and Pattern in Nature

2012-01-11T09:25:00.000-08:00

Have you ever seen such a thing as what's displayed in the photos below? believe it or not these photos aren't taken at the Harvard Museum of Natural History or any other museum with magnificent collections of rocks and minerals for that matter. These are magnified photos of common sand! "Professor Gary Greenberg who has a PhD in biomedical research from University College London said: 'It is incredible to think when you are walking on the beach you are standing on these tiny treasures."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2011471/Pictures-sand-Close-photographs-reveal-incredible-beauty.html#ixzz1jAeBfjDb

Just last week I was watching tv and amazed all over again at seeing close up pictures of snowflakes. I'm sure we've all seen them at one point or another in our lives but it's easy to forget these kinds of things in our daily lives. So have another look! For more snow flake pics go to snowcrystals.com where these were taken from.

"A Cloudy Day" Final Drawings

2011-12-30T13:14:00.000-08:00

I have afew minutes before I take off for the night so i figured I would post a pic of the final drawings for my newest book. Tehse aren't in order int eh phtoo or anything. Just sprayed them with fixative adn getting ready for the acrylic medium before I start the final paintings! This book is called, "A Cloudy Day" and is my second book with author Peter DaPuzzo. It's more whimsical than my othe rbooks which I've foudn I like quit a bit. I'm using acrylics for this book which is the firsttime I've used acrylics for a book. I've done three books in oil, two in watercolor/ mixed media, one in graphite. Eventually I hope to do a digitally painted book. One day I suppose I will settle on one medium.

Black and White Graphite Chapter Book drawings

2011-11-26T06:57:00.000-08:00

Over the past month I've been working on a few projects, one of those being my second chapter book. I don't have much time to talk about these but wanted to finally post them on my blog. I also figured now would be a good time to finally figure out how to make an animated GIF to show my process, something I've wanted to do for a while but never took a minute to figure out. Turned out to be much easier than I thought it would be! SO above is Gif showing my process for one of the images and the final three drawings below. They still aren't 100% done as I have to make tiny adjustments but none the less I'm quit happy with how these turned out an hope I get more projects like this. I was very surprised to find out that these graphite drawings took almost as much time as a finished oil illustration (probably because of how much time was put into designing the various creatures and settings and the extra work put into preliminary shading of sketches). These are for "The Silver Shuttle" which I have posted the cover illustration process for already in a series of posts.

The image above is a scene inside a tunnel inhabited by a worm creature. I won't go into all of the specifics of all of these (you'll have to read the book!). For this image I will say that the walls of the cave at this point in the action have been covered by tons of glowing strings which have also wrapped around the worm causing it to decay. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to best draw a dark cave as though it was being wrapped by glowing strings.Unlike paint, I knew I wouldn't be able to just add more white on top later if needed but need to figure out the best way to preserve any whites I needed. Keeping in mind erasing can only go so far and can effect later pencil work. I did experiment with painting on top of the graphite and photoshop ideas as well but really wanted to stick with graphite if possible. I was heavily relying on the work of Chris Van Allsburg as he is really the only really amazing graphite artists that I know of off the top of my head. He's quit famous for getting spectacular glowing effects in his expertly rendered graphite drawings.

For this image, one of the more difficult aspects was trying to show detail in the main two characters heading into the tree, while keeping the main focus on the enormous tree. I needed to pull out far enough to see the context and to see a good amount of branches while still being able to see those two main figures.

This last image had all kinds of difficulties for me.The most challenging aspects are the swan shaped "lamp" which had to be glowing and the explosion of water surrounding Annie. In the end I didn't worry as much about whether her shirt and skin and rocks look wet as this wasn't intended to be a photo realistic depiction but I did struggle through those things as it can be hard for me to let those things go sometimes and to know exactly how much information to include.Instead I focused on the main action, imagined what the creatures wings would look like with the light shining through the thin webbing, and really focused on showing the details in the swan while still having that glow.
If the image had just been a character standing ina well with a flashlight I may have spent more time differentiating the rocks with their own characteristics, shapes, adding lichen, tree roots, etc. I may have had stuff floating in the water, had her reflection etc. but for an image like this with so much other action I needed to zone in on the really important aspects to favor telling the story rather than overwhelming with too much info. The good thing about chapter books is that they have plenty of room to elaborate on all of those details to help the readers mind go to work in filling in all the little things that can't be fit into one single drawing.
This book should be available before Christmas if all goes well with publishing. Very excited to have this one sitting on my shelves as I truly enjoyed reading the story, love the themes and imagery involved along with the settings. I'll be sure to announce it's arrival on Amazon.

Teen Chapter Book Cover Design: Five

2011-11-10T14:12:00.000-08:00

For earlier posts for this cover design:

thumbnail Sketch

Rough Sketch

revised dog

Final Drawing and Color Samples

This should be one of the last posts i do for this cover as it's almost done. I may do one more final post once the text is added, but will likely wait till the book is available in about a month. Below is the final illustration as it currently stands. I still have a few small things to fix and have to get a better scan of the image for more accurate colors. I had a lot of fun painting this one as it brought up many challenges and some new stuff I've never drawn or painted before. It also gave me the opportunity to paint in oils again which I haven't done for most of the year. Working on the internal drawings while I wait to hear back from the client with comments and input on the cover. The chapter heading spot illustration is below. Seems like a strange chapter heading to go with the cover but in reading the book it all makes sense!

My Books Arrived!

2011-11-09T09:31:00.000-08:00

My brand new book, "Allegra, Friend of All Monsters" Just arrived at my doorstep yesterday! (insert mental image of me doing backflips here) I've got a handfull of copies of that book as well as my other two books for anyone interested. Just let me know if you want a signed copy and if you want it signed to anyone in particular. Of course the books are allways available via the links on the left hand side of my blog or on the "book Store" tab of my website. http://www.matthewgauvin.com/

Character Designs for "A Cloudy Day"

2011-11-04T11:30:00.000-07:00

Well, I've slowly but surely begun work on my new children's book "A Cloudy Day". Got the two main characters designed, figured out what the car will look like, and figured out the overall structure/ layout of the book complete with one round of rough thumbnail sketches. I probably won't reveal much of that stuff until the book is done or at least close to it. For now I just wanted to post some character sketches. These are just the initial motionless body poses to get a feel for the shape and size of the characters. In particular, the skin tone colors aren't correct yet. I may show more of the actual evolution of the character designs later. This book actually started out as a winter book but then i made a comment about maybe having the kids in the back of a convertible so we wouldn't be boxed into a small car in every scene. So now it will take place in the summer.

I'm finally starting to get better and faster with designing characters of young children. This is a task I have been trying to study and get a grasp on ever since my days at Massachusetts College of Art. I still have TONS to learn and really there are soo many amazing styles for drawing children's book characters. I'm just now starting to settle down a bit into a particular style while still trying to improve with each new book. Also since I'm currently doing a lot of self published material I find it's basically necesary to constantly let my style evolve as each book has drastically different needs.

I think the first time I realized I would have to learn to draw and paint kids is when a friend in one of my illustration classes made a valid point during a class critique. With the whole class critiquing my artwork, he pointed out that the kid I had painted looked "Special". It caught me a bit off guard at the moment but i had to agree with him once I took a look from their perspective.

The image for that critique was actually one of my main portfolio pieces and would later be printed up as one of my first ever mailer postcards to be sent out to publishers all around the U.S. I spent a couple hundred dollars to have thousands of copies printed. This is the painting when it was "corrected" after the class critique (the one on the right).

         There is still a lot to like about these images, in fact the one on the left landed my first children's book gig! Now I look back on these and realize I wasn't ready for the publishers at that time. It's likely that kids would still love the images but unfortunately in order to get my illustrations accepted by publishers and bought by parents and into the kids hands, I have to go through adults. Publishers see hundreds if not thousands of art submissions each week on their desk and most of that goes directly to the trash can. They look for unique styles, good handling of subject matter, great understanding of color, composition, the ability to tell stories through images, etc etc. but above all a children's book illustrators have to understand how to paint children in a lively and fun way. That can be anything from the style of charlie brown comics or dora the exploror to a full on deatailed exagerated realism character like norman rockwell. I still struggle with that myself but have made huge leaps and bounds over the past few years.

     Sometimes it's hard for artists to look at their own art objectively. We spend hours and hours drawing and painting an image and redrawing and repainting, moving and shaping, pushing tugging, splatting, sloshing, rubbing, dabbing etc. we might spend twenty minutes just trying to get a nose to look right or an hour painting the eyes with a tiny little brush that has bristles flairing out at the ends. It takes patience, a steady hand and the perfect flick of the brush to get just the right amount of hairs, with just the right amount of paint, to land in just the right spot and shape, to form the whites of the characters eyes ; on a face that is less than an inch in height on the canvas. Then when you feel you got the paint in the right spot, you find that it's not the correct hue in relation to it's surroundings or that is the exact moment your little sister walks into the room to tell you one of the eyes is lower than the other, LOL.

    I feel I have started to retain some of the things I've been learning on the topic and hope to write some blog posts soon discussing how to draw and paint kids. Everything from what materials and mediums I find to work best, how to draw folds in clothing, drawing various hair styles, drawing the same character in different poses, designing the character, drawing emotions and facial expressions etc. All the stuff I still struggle with greatly! haha. But it should be fun to learn even more on the topics and put it all into written form for my own future reference and for yours. I'll be sure to reference books and websites on the topic whenver I know of any.

A Peek Into An Illustrator's Life: One

2011-11-03T07:22:00.000-07:00

This is the start of a series of blog posts I've wanted to start for quit some time, in which I hope to share some funny and interesting stories from my life as an artist or life in general.  A good children's illustrator knows how kids think and what they want to see. I think we pretend this has something to do with our keen insights or our fascinating ability to observe human nature at it's best. When in reality we all know it has a lot more to do with the fact that most children's illustrators are still just big kids ourselves. I still haven't figured out how to brush my hair. I once read a post on facebook asking, "has anyone noticed that grownups are just kids trapped in bigger bodies?"

How else can a children's book illustrator start such a series but with a quote from a kid?! Kids are the best!

One day while working in the studio I was listening to an old episode of "This American Life"  about the logic of kids.

                  Adult: "What does the tooth fairy do with all the teeth?"

                   Kid: "She collects them and makes stuff."

                  Adult: "Like what?"

                  Kid: Tooth chairs , tooth trophies and tooth houses"

               ...Adult: "Why does she make houses out of teeth instead of bricks?"

                  Kid (without missing a beat): "Because no one doesn't have brick teeth"

The things that kids say are just so unbelievably genius in their originality and spontanaity! This reminds me of the time I went out to eat with family after church. There was another family from church sitting at the table next to us. The mom was actually one of the religious ed teachers and I always see her showing her kids how to do the sign of the cross, explaining the various things the priest does etc. When it came time to order drinks I overheard the little boy tell the waitress that he wants a Bud light on Draft! The look on the parents faces was priceless. I later heard the father tell the waitress that they discovered the boy had read the phrase from a sign hanging in the restaurant "We serve Bud light On Draft!"

       Some grown ups spend a lot of time trying to be young again or look young again, while kids just can't wait to grow up. I suppose that has something to do with why many children's books apeal just as much to the parents reading them as to the kids being read to.

Teen Chapter Book Cover Design: Four

2011-11-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

For earlier posts for this cover design:
thumbnail Sketch
Rough Sketch
revised dog

In the past few days I refined the characters even further for the final sketch, then dove right into the color samples. The deadline for this project is extremely short so I'm a bit out of my comfort zone and cutting out various steps to move things along as quickly as possible. In the last post I showed my revisions for the dog character. In this final drawing I revised the face to better match the initial character design,
I completely revised the structure of the birds bodies, moved the legs around a bit on the dog to strengthen his pose and I shortened his neck and tilted the head to get back some of that aggressive quality in my initial dogs sketches. Finally I added some rough indications of clouds circling the moon.

For the color samples I tried all kinds of things with the sky and experimented some with how the "silver Shuttle" object in her hand would be painted with a glow. These are just rough to get a feel for final color and tonal structure of the piece.

He Looks just like YOU!

2011-10-31T09:20:00.000-07:00

Whenever I have a spare moment I enjoy looking through other artists blogs and seeing all of their work, process and studies. Recently I realized that some of my favorite blogs do nothing more than just post some of their finished artwork with a simple title and maybe a short description for what inspired the piece. I then realized I very rarely post finished art on my blog or atleast none of my newer stuff. I've done a bunch of finished book covers recently that I posted but have left out so much of my other art. So now I'm going to start posting some finished artwork every now and then for those who never have the chance to make it to my actual website. You can allways view more there http://www.matthewgauvin.com/

    This first one is from the book "The Little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday". I recently posted this image on my artwanted page and got a comment that it looks like a norman Rockwell! LOL, Yeah, maybe when he was ten and just starting to paint! But he was deffinetly one of my first inspirations, so it was fun to be compared to him.
          I also keep hearing that the little boy looks like he was modled after myself, BWAHAHAHAHA. Seriously had about five different people say that. I never wear red, don't have red hair, I'm 27 with thinning hair. But I do have glasses and messy hair and used to be extremely skinny and I used to have blue shoes, so I can see where they are coming from.
         I find it quit interesting that the author of the book actually has people telling him that the little boy looks like him (he wears glasses too). The funny thing is that I have often felt a character looks like me a bit but in those instances I spend hours trying to resolve the issue,haha. I'm thinking of one character in particular for my "Samantha Loses the Box Turtle" book where no matter how much I changed the character, I kept feeling like it looked like me. I have a feeling this is a somewhat common thing amongst artists, as I have noticed it in other artists work. Sometimes it's because we use photoreferences of ourselves as a starting point but mostly I think it's simply because we are our own most familiar face. Some of us even dare look at ourselves in the mirror every day!
      As artists, the way we draw is to observe nature and try to mimic it in some feeble way, even when we're drawing something imaginairy like a monster or a talking train or unicorn, dragon etc. we are allways going to rely on our minds reference library taken directly form nature itself. I've allways wondered how a person blind since birth might go about the task of drawing various things, if overnight they were given the ability to see, to draw extremely well and weren't alowed to leave the room or look at other artists work. I think in a way that's a bit of a conundrum as I can't imagine an artist being able to draw well, if they don't have some sort of knowledge base for what exists in the world. You can't draw a cat if you've never seen one and you can't make a dragon look like a dragon if you don't share a common understanding of the various things that make it a dragon. However I do know that there are a wide range of possible ways to draw any given creature and still have it remain recognizable. Will Terry has an excellent video about how to design characters on his folio academy website which illustrates this point perfectly. Regardless, every artist has to start with something. We don't create out of nothing. God is the only artist in all of human history who has ever created out of nothing. Many artists draw images from their head, but their head is filled with everything they've ever seen in life and observed in nature. We don't create in a box no matter how talented we may be. I think even Feank Frazetta would have to attest to that if pushed far enough.

IF: Scary

2011-10-28T06:28:00.000-07:00

I haven't posted on Illustration Friday for a while so I'm overdue. I'm actually working on an image at the moment that illustrates the word!!! Particularly surprising since the word is "SCARY".

I was at the local archery shop the other day and the owner asked me what I do for a living to which I replied I'm a children's book illustrator. My friend happened to mention my recent blog post about the BBQ company logo I'm working on. I then explained that I may be getting a bit of BBQ product from that client and said we should hold another cookout and say that we shot the pigs ourselves with our bows. Of course the shop owner just happened to have a pig skull on the wall from a pig he had shot,LOL. He was a bit confused when I started showing interest in the skull as a reference for one of my current projects. HE asked, "wait, didn't you say you were a children's book illustrator?"

The funny thing is that the pig skull actually would have been a great reference for one of my current books as I needed to design a crazy, scary looking dog. As I've done almost no work of this sort, I don't have a reference library for random animal skulls, animal muscle anatomy to exaggerate the ferociousness of the creature etc. Luckily I did have some great art website resources available to me that helped a ton. The birds in the sample above still need a lot of work but the dog has already undergone quit a transformation and still has a bit left to go.

The first one was drawn mostly from my head as an initial impression using mainly wolves as a reference.The second one actually was never intended to look like the taco bell dog but somehow references of dog skeletons, wolves, panthers, lions etc. lead to that puny little woof. The third one I feel finally hits the nail on the head.

BBQ Logo Design: One

2011-10-26T06:14:00.000-07:00

Along with my new chapter book, I've also been working on a new logo design and a new children's book. The company needing the new logo is "The Bottomless Pit Bar-B-Q". We started with their current logo which is actually a stock illustration and their current t-shirt design which was done by a friend of theirs.

With these images as a starting point, they told me they wanted one image to serve both the needs of the t-shirt, the business cards AND for printed lables to put on their products. They also wanted the main character to be a mixture of pig and man standing at a grill. So i set to work finding reference photos of pigs and hefty men and got the bunch of rough samples below.

From these, so far they like number six for the face but I'm guessing we'll want to put a bigger body/belly on him as they want the name of their business actually written acrross his apron. They're also planning to send some photos of the actual grill they use to try some samples with that. I'm guessing it looks something like that T-shirt drawing above. A bit boxy and angular but I think I can make it work without it looking too much like a coffin. Personally I was kind of leaning more towards number one or seven but was getting a bit worried that these may be too detailed for a small business card. So I made aquick sample and printed it off. Looks good even at the small size.

Teen Chapter Book Cover Design:Two

2011-10-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

For part one of this cover design: Part One
Been drawing a lot of flying creatures and tons of photoshop work trying to figure out the composition for my new book coveer. I think things are getting much closer! This is still a rough draft as I have to completely redraw her face and put in lots more detail for the creatures. probably going to work on color samples a bit today.

Teen Chapter Book Cover Design

2011-10-18T06:40:00.000-07:00

Finally getting in some serious time on my new projects so I'll be posting sketches from a couple different projects over the next few weeks. For now just taking a moment to post some very rough preliminary sketches for my new chapter book cover design. The book is "The Silver Shuttle" by Jennifer Hayes".
This is really only the second book I've done for this reading level and is going to be a ton of fun! For this book I have the opportunity to do three very detailed shaded graphite renderings of action packed scenes and one cover illustration which I hope to do in oil if time allows. The only catch is that I have two other in depth projects going on at the same time and only have about three weeks left to work on this chapter book, YIKES! Back to work.

Samantha Loses The Box Turtle Cover Design:Part Two

2011-10-14T19:47:00.000-07:00

For part one, in which I show the initial steps for designing this cover, click HERE

In the first post on this cover I showed some of my thumbnail sketches and rough draft sketches. This first image below shows where that last post left off, with the rough drawing on the left. On the right I've included a revised drawing which fixes the facial features and removes the globe in the background while tightening up other aspects of the image.

Then i did some quick color samples with about four different color schemes for the background illustration. We initially decided on the option below with a dominantly cool temperature color scheme, purples and blues. I threw in some initial rough text ideas but we eventually decided we needed the cover to be a bit more friendly to boys.

So from there the client liked warmer colors in the background illustration and it was a matter of trying to find a new color for the surrounding cover layout.

Throughout the whole process I sketched ideas for the title font, which we intended to be hand drawn. A lot of this felt repetetive but quit necesary. I was trying to invent my own font and wanted to get things to feel right for this particular book while also having the letters themeselves work together as a unit. It's not as easy as typing the words into photoshop and trying a bunch of different fonts in a matter of minutes. I have no training in graphhic design or text design but often enjoy trying my hand at it. With this book I was a bit frustrated because I had to create a text that would work for all the books in this series of "Samantha" books. SO I kept having ideas for the text that woudl fit this particular book but wouldn't work for the whole series. I also still have no idea what animals are in the rest of the series.

I did also try some computer fonts and actually started to like a couple of them but the client was drawn to an earlier hand drawn option.

So for our final font we agreed upon the one below.

I then took this basic font and tried various shading and colors on the font itself and paired those with our chosen color sample and cover layout color. This gave us a really good idea of what the final cover would look like.

Now the final watercolor painting. Some of these pics are taken in low light and the final product was scanned and further tweaked in photoshop.

The final product is now available on Amazon for the kindle and other e-readers. Just click the link on the left side of my blog!

Free!!! My Brand New E-Book

2011-10-12T20:43:00.000-07:00

Facebook friends please be aware this is an Rss feed from my blog and mostly just repeats info I've shared on Facebook previously. I think this will be about the fourth time this book cover has shown up on my profile in the past week,LOL.

I wanted to let everyone know that my brand New E-Book "Samantha Loses The Box Turtle" is now available AND it's FREE!!!! http://thefrugalgirls.com/2011/10/free-kids-smashwords-ebook.html check out that link for details on how to get the book free on smashwords. for a limited time anyway.

        First I just really want to say I enjoyed working with this client every step of the way and she's a super generous woman with her time and seems to be the greatest mom. So Personally I would love to see a bunch of folks go out and pay the $3.99 for the book just to help her along a bit. We worked on the book over the past seven months and I really do think you won't regret it, as your kids will enjoy it. YET, she is the one telling me I should alert folks about this coupon to get the book for free so please don't feel bad about doing so. Tell all your friends. If your an artist, friend or family member, get the book to see my new artwork for my first ever chapter book. If you're a parent get the book for your kids or for grand kids etc. You can't do any better than free.

      It's available for kindle, Nook, PDF etc. so if you have any of the popular e-readers then you already know how it all works. If you don't have an e-reader then head on over to Amazon and download there free "Kindle for the PC". Go onto the page for any e-book and there is a link to download this free software for your computer. Or just get the PDF version of the book if you already have adobe reader downloaded. It's all pretty simple and straightforward but let me know if you have any questions.

    The author and I both would LOVE any and all reviews of the book you could share on amazon or elsewhere you find the book listed, Barnes and Nobles etc. Feel free to leave comments on this blog as well and I'll be sure the author is aware of them. Amazon is most helpful as it lets folks know if the book is any good if they are thinking about purchasing it. Thanks and enjoy!
-Matthew

Little Ducky!

2011-09-15T08:20:00.000-07:00

A quick fun digital drawing I did this morning. It's raining out and some how I let my whole morning get off track and just started sketching color onto a duck sketch I did a while back. For some reason I keep forgetting to use my stylus when drawing digitally, Keep using my mouse which I've heard reffered to as the equivelant of using a rock to draw.

Samantha Loses The Box Turtle Chapter Book Cover Design

2011-09-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

I'm exausted but wanted to get up yet ANOTHER book cover design I'm working on. Just finsihed up the "Allegra Friend of All Monsters" Children's book cover design and illustation. I'm tryign to finish off this new cover and about five more black and white illustrations by mid next week! Yikes! Here's what I've doen so far.
A bunch of thumbnails for the client to choose from.

She narrowed it down to a few so i revised those a bit adn did a coupel new ones.

She then asked all of her facebook friends to weigh in and folsk were all over the place! three or four people for each image,LOL. Thena few folks seemed to lean towards number one as kids will love the closeup on the turtle and Sam. We both agreed that seems to be the one for our cover which will mostly be viewed at a small size on amazon before beign purchase. So here's my revised rawing for that. I have a coupel versions to determien if we hould have the backgroudn drawn in or not.

with that I did some variations on the title design. thinking of going with a hadn drawn personalized title for this one as it will repeat from one book to the next and we wanted soemthing to define the series. I liked number five which has the turtle pattern laid over the font. Woudl look cool when all painted and tightened up.

Digital Children's Illustration

2011-09-03T06:34:00.000-07:00

Last night I spent some time reading some of the blogs I follow and came across one that actually moved me to action. You know how it is to read or see something that inspires you and motivates you to actually give it a try. The blogger who gets the credit this time is Wilson Williams Jr. Here's the post that inspired me. http://kwankwest.blogspot.com/2011/09/lion-and-mouse-process.html

Well after seeing that and leaving a comment I couldn't just leave it at that. I immediately found an illustration I had already drawn in black and white and went to work on my second ever digital painting!

Now of course I wouldn't consider this done by any means but it was getting late and I had already spent the entire day working on art, so I was just about to stop for the night. At this point I'm still not happy with the result but I can start to see where I could eventually get a pleasing end result with more work.

The hardest thing for me to get a grasp on with digital art is how to chose good colors. Traditional mediums for me seem to lend themsleves more easily to harmonious color combinations. It's just a matter of reading a few tutorials and learnign to use color palettes and such, I'm sure.

Then I had another burst of inspiration and went to town on a small cropped section of the painting to get in a bit more detail and color.

Another artist whom i have mentioned many times before is Dani Jones, as she's done a lot to inspire me in the world of digital art. she got me interested enough to try out my first digital painting below. I suppose for now I will keep trying to squeeze in some of these practice paintings on the side and eventually i will feel comfotable enough with the medium to use it on some final artwork.

Final Monster Children's Book Cover

2011-09-01T11:04:00.000-07:00

A couple of previous posts about how I designed the cover for my new book "Allegra Friend of All Monsters"
Thumbnails and Ideas for Cover

color and cover design

Now this is the final post for this book cover design. In the first two posts I showed how I start with rough thumbnail sketches and talked a bit about my understanding of what makes a good cover design. I then showed the final drawing, color sample and a bit of the various design ideas for the background of the cover surounding the actual illustration, with a bit of experimentation with the fonts and text placement.
To that point the client and I agreed that number nine was the best option.

In this final step the graphic designer tried a bunch of different fonts and we decided on the ones below. I also did some work in photoshop to make some minor but important adjustments. First I had to cut out around the treasure chest on the back cover to get rid of the pinkish background color and create a new shadow to better fit the cover color.

While seeing the text laid out, I realized I cropped a bit too close on the illustration and didn't leave enough room for the text to fit comfortably. The cover needs to have room left for the bleed area which will be cropped off in printing. SO I went back into the original files and adjusted that. Now you can see a bit more of the book shelf, mirror and rug.

Then I realized the rubber ducky on the front cover was in the way of the text so I eventually moved that in photoshop and patched up the spot it was orginally.

Now all that's left is to move the names up a bit at the bottom so they won't be cropped off in printing and we have our final cover!

Weird Mediums Three

2011-08-31T07:44:00.000-07:00

I started this series called "Weird Mediums" as I learned of a couple of artists doing some very unique and entertaining art that I wanted to share with others. I've previously done two posts HERE and HERE . Below are some of my more recent discoveries I'm sure you'll enjoy.

Xiaonan Sun is a fantastic portrait artist who I first learned about in viewing his time lapse video of him doing a portrait in salt. Since then I’ve seen a couple of other artists use that technique but I think Xiaonan is worth a mention because he’s younger than me and does amazing portrait art which I know from experience is difficult to get a Likeness. His video on YouTube

His personal website http://www.theportraitart.com/about.html

The first book carver I ever heard of was Brian dettmer. He uses old books as his medium and carefully carves images and sculptures into the books in great detail and precision. You can view a ton of his work on his website at http://briandettmer.com/

For some other weird uses for books check out this website which shows books used to make a building, a chair, a kindle case etc.http://www.neatorama.com/2011/04/27/cool-non-literary-uses-for-books/

I first learned about this next fellow through his video in which he paints on a black board with glue and then throws dirt against that in the end to reveal the image. Kind of reminds me of those sand art images I used to do as a kid. Michael Raivard also does various other kinds of performance painting with great flare and energy. Fun to watch!

This next one is also quite fascinating to watch and has an a stounding result. This artist drops paint into water to create water paintings, a process called “ebru”, and then captures the final image on paper. Unfortunately I can’t figure out who the artist is but here’s a video of him at work on YouTube.

Just yesterday I was reading James Gurney’s blog and he posted a very interesting series of talks by various artists. One was Vic Muniz who uses tons of creativity and weird mediums in his art. Everything from doing line drawings of cartoony clouds in the sky with a plane to a skull of a clown which of course has a bulbed nose bone.

I found him entertaining to listen to. http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/vik_muniz_makes_art_with_wire_sugar.html

This next one I’m not sure qualifies for weird mediums as it’s fairly typical to use found objects in sculpture but none the less I loved his work and it certainly is weird! So here’s a video of some of Daniel Proulx’s steam punk jewelry.

Watercolor Landscape: Calm before the Storm

2011-08-29T10:36:00.000-07:00

There was plenty to be done in preparation for Hurricane Irene. In particular I was concerned simply because I had no idea what to expect, so I didn't know if I needed to put boards over my studio windows to protect my art, should I pick the rest of my tomatoes even though there are about thirty green ones? should I put sandbags at the base of the garage door to protect my fathers camaro that we just had brought up to this house?, or the 48 oldsmobile that has been sitting here for years? In the end I just picked up the larger objects in the yard and didn't worry too much about all the extra stuff. I did however find myself at the church helping the nights of Columbus cut down a bunch of brush and trees and tear down and old fence. There's nothing quit like a gathering of ten men with trucks, chainsaws, weedwhackers a heavy duty chain and an old wheathered fence. Whoever put those fence posts two and a half feet into the ground, to insure they wouldn't fall over, certainly didn't have us in mind as the ones who would be ripping them out!

Before all of the fun began, I found myself with an hour or so of quiet misty morning light in the church parking lot alone, as I had to drop my mom off to work early in the day. So I brought my watercolor sketching supplies along and did the image above. As this was one day before Hurricane Irene I'm calling it "The Calm Before the Storm". It was an interesting feeling to be working on such a calm scene a day before destruction and chaos was predicted to hit the area.

Should Modern Illustrations Use Older Designs?

2011-08-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

This is a question that's come up a number of times for me as I illustrate various books. For my first book I was faced with the issue of whether I should use an older model fire truck. If I remember correctly, the client liked the older fire trucks and wanted one of those to represent the small town. I think that worked fine. However a lot more of my illustrations have gadgets like phones, tv's, clocks, cars, etc. which raise a question for me. Sometimes the more modern designs are so sleek and so small and simply not as illustrator friendly as the older models.
I'll give you one example that comes to mind. I'm currently doing a book that will have an alarm clock on various pages. My concern with the newer clocks is that they may not be as easy to illustrate as a recognizable object if it's further in the background. When you see an older model alarm clock with the round face and the bells on top it is easily recognizable as a small suggested shape or close up.

For a different book I had to show a girl in a crosswalk with a cell phone. The trouble was how to illustrate that because modern cell phones are tiny or even just hang on the ear. SO I ended up oversizing it a bit so it wouldn't just look like she had her hand on her head. When I look into the future I see this becoming more and more of an issue for illustrators as I fully expect we will need to rely on older models to get our points across. Imagine having to illustrate a guy reading a newspaper in a time period where physical paper newspapers have been replaced by digital readers. You would have this slim piece of plastic in his hands that could be mistaken for any number of other objects. Not the same as a good ole black and white newspaper with all of it's glorious creases, fold and the shear size and shape of it. We've gone from record players to tape players, to CD players and now into the tiny MP3 players.

So I wonder how other's generally address this issue.

Monster Book Cover Design: Two

2011-08-09T18:27:00.000-07:00

A few months back I posted the initial thumbnail sketches for the cover design of my new Children's book "Allegra Friend of All Monsters" HERE . From that series of thumbnails the client chose number four as our starting point.

Eventually we ended up incorporating more background stuff into the image.

Then I finally tightened it up borrowing heavily from an internal image while simplifying things a bit to better suit the cover design. Then I did asuper quick color sample. I was kind of tiered of doing samples by that point and just wanted to get into the final artwork.

I then did the final artwork and did a super rough layout.

Now all of the artwork is finished for the book and our graphic designer is doing the final internal layout. Below are some rough cover sample layouts I've been working on to try and figure out which direction to take it in. I'll play around more with the back cover color later but for now I'm trying to ge tmy initial title concepts on paper (so to speek). I think I have apersonal favorite out of these and others I'm seeing might not work as well as they did in my head. I'm hoping the graphic desiigner will be interested at giving it her best shot as well, so we can get a large range of ideas to chose from. Fonts and text deffinetly aren't my area of expertise I also don't have a large font database available to me. Anyway, which direction do you think I should head with these?

This book is expected to be published by the end of September. My previouse book just came out and is available on Amazon! The Little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday

IF Stay

2011-07-09T12:36:00.000-07:00

My post for this week's Illustration Friday word: STAY. This is an image I did for my first illustrated children's book "Rudy Reporting for Duty" Unfortunately the book still hasn't been published and I have no control over that. Still hoping that client will one day chose to get it published as it's still one of my favorite books I illustrated. I do kind of wish there was a way I could go back and redo the illustrations though, now that I've had about five years to improve on my talents.

black and white truck Illustration

2011-06-25T19:32:00.000-07:00

Just got a logo/t-shirt /business card design gig at the beginning of the week on a short deadline and already finished by the end of the week. Wish all my projects could be like this. I may do a final color rendition in the future if the client wants that but for nwo he needed something quickly for a truck show he's headed to in a week or so. I started with these rough thumbnails thinking he wanted something a bit more cartoony.

I soon realized he wanted something to depict a particular model and year with a certain level of detail so from there I eventually got the below design. I also got him a great deal with the printers, $40 off! If you ever need any truck parts for the sort of truck mentioned below, you can contact him via the e-mail along the top of the image.

IF Launch

2011-06-20T21:35:00.000-07:00

This week's word for Illustration Friday is Launch. I could think of nothing more appropriate than my cats favorite passtime. Two of their favorite passtimes are "Launching" and "Plopping". They will launch themselves from the cat tree and land on coffee tables five feet below. They will launch from my lap to my keyboard or from my buearu to my stomach while I'm sleeping. They seem to have this great knack for knowing the exact instant I'm just about to wake up because for some reason I always seem to wake up just moments after one of them launches themselves onto my stomach. Funny how that works. Too bad my sense of humor doesn't kick in until sometime in the afternoon.

As for plopping, they will plop down and go to sleep on just about anything so long as it's something I happen to be working on. They love to lay down on my drawings and walk over paintings. They really seem to love sleeping on my scanner, keyboard, on my chair etc. The harder they fall and the wider they can streatch out their legs to scatter art supplies, papers, coffee, books or whatever is in reach, the louder they pur. They particularly seem to love plopping down in front of me while I'm trying to walk by them. Over the years this has made me in to something of an olympic athlete in the sport of Cat dodging.

Black and White Line Drawing Kids

2011-06-17T11:01:00.000-07:00

I really don't plan to post all of the illustrations from my current books but I just finished off another yesterday and can't resist the urge to post it. So here it is.

The first is the thumbnail sketch, then the pencil line drawing of "gerti" and the turtle. Then the last is the near finished image. The dark black pen and ink lines were working good for the other spot illustrations of objects but looked horrible for kids faces and hair. I tried a couple fo times and couldn't get a pleasing result with the pen and ink. SO I did a bit more digging looking into other artists. Then I found Denise Brunkus who uses a dark graphite pencil for the line drawing and then fills the drawing in with ink. I loved the soft edges of the pencil for the face contours and the gentle gradation in the hair and the fact that the pencil seemed to be easier to draw lines of varrying width and leave breaks in the line without looking bad. This final image is inspired by that medium and artist.

Mail Art For James Gurney's Contest

2011-06-10T13:26:00.000-07:00

Today I was working on the book cover for one fo my books listening to an episode of "This American Life" called "Letters" when I realized today is the day! Today is the day James Gurney posted the mail art he recieved for his contest. I wanted to make a video for his video contest a while back but didn't have time, then wanted to do this mail art contest and ran out of time up till the very last second. Then I realized the post office was closed that day as it was memorial day weekend. SO I asked James if he coudl move the postmark deadline until after memorial day and he did! Yeah! So while I'm not really happy with my entry I did in fact get to enter. Please head over to his blog and vote on the entries today and tomorrow. http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2011/06/envelope-art-contest-please-vote.html There are some great entries by others.

Here's my mail art for the contest.

IF-Shadows

2011-06-07T05:09:00.000-07:00

Another Illustration friday image. This weeks word is "Shadows". Once again I'm chosing an image from my current book I'm working on because this book is filled with shadows. The book is "allegra Friend of Al Monsters" and will be out sometime this year. I thought about trying to shade this image or paint this one real fast to have the finished image for IF but it would have been silly for me to let IF dictate that process. Anyway, here it is!

Chapter book Line drawings / Black and white Drawings

2011-06-04T11:22:00.000-07:00

Final artwork for my first chapter book is underway! For this project, as usual, I started with some small thumbnail sketches of each illustration concept.

Then I chose one of the simplest and favorites to try out some different finished results. Since I've never done finished black and white chapter book illustrations before, I needed to see what style looked the best. I looked at lots of line drawings from other artists to get a feel for what others are doing. I could go to a museum or pet store to take a picture of a box turtle and then copy the picture detail for detail, with a beautifully rendered pencil drawing, with all levels of shading and value, but that's not what we were going for with this particular project. I hoped to have an end result that would be a mix of realistic and yet have a spark of life and character. Some of the artwork I was looking at was perfectly rendered linework but it was all very even lines with no defferentiation in width adn nothing to help the eye defferntiate between forms in the image. I tried a few things and the client and her family chose the one that works best for the kindle and looks best overall ( Ink line, shaded in ink). I also experimented with digital linework on Inkscape and Illustrator but after a few hours of frustration I realized it would take too much time to get that to look beter than my hand drawn stuff.

Then I went ahead and drew all of the images as line drawings on heavy duty paper and scanned them in. This would allow me at the very least to print them off later in case I made a mistake on the first version.

Then I just went to town with the ink trying to have a variety of values.

I've got four more of these small spot illustrations to go and about five full page illustrations and one color cover illustration for this book. The working title is "Samantha and the Box Turtle" and will be available on amazon for the kindle and other e-readers sometime this year.

IF "asleep"

2011-05-30T19:43:00.000-07:00

This week's illustration friday word is "asleep". It was extremely hard for me to chose one single image to use for this because nearly every book I have ever done has the main character fall asleep somewhere in the book. Kind of makes me want to write a book where the main characters special ability is that they never have to sleep. I have often wondered what it would be like if our bodies didn't need rest and we could just keep going for days without sleep and without feeling tiered. Anyway, for IF I chose to use a drawing from the book I am currently working on "Allegra Friend of All Monsters"

I thought it would be neat to post my other characters sleeping as well. I had no idea how many sleeping characters I actually had until doing this. These are all from different books and I may have even more I wasn't able to find.

"Samantha and the Box Turtle" Coming out this year

"The Caterpillar and the Express Train" available on Amazon

"The Litlle Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday" coming out this year

"Spirit Driver"

"Rudy Reporting for Duty" My first Book!

"Clara and the One Eyed Sand Hog" My second Book!

The Monsterous color sample Disaster (with a happy ending) : How I make Color Samples for my Children's Books

2011-05-07T07:45:00.000-07:00

I started the color sample stage of my new book a couple of weeks ago and expected to be working on the final art by now. Working with new clients always has surprises, good and difficult ones. This book was moving along quit fast until we hit the color stage. Till this point I've had the entire color scheme in my head and briefly mentioned my rough ideas to the client a couple of times which he seemed to like. I guess I'm really not great at verbal/written communication though because the first set of color samples were apparently nothing like what he expected. I wanted an overall cool temperature color scheme since the book takes place at night and I wanted to have the warm glow from the lamp as a subordinate color that would dance around the room and light up the cooler objects. That tends to be my style in any image I can work that sort of thing into.

So I worked on the first six samples for image one just laying in rough colors. They looked awkward with the watercolors painted on printing paper so I went over the colors in photoshop. I hadn't even considered that this now made them all more saturated than what I intended.

The client hated them and felt they clashed and in turn suggested I use very light pinks and an almost white yellow for the walls. So I did samples 7-11 above with the bed blanket sample for referecne. No matter how I tried to explain the whole idea of the nighttime cool colors and warm glow of the lamp I just couldn't get him to see my vision which I had been developing in my head for this book since the first time I read the manuscript oct.29th of 2010.

He kept wanting things lighter and more girly. So for another image I tried the lighter colors knowing this was getting really pastel colored and far from my normal color inclinations.

At this point I began thinking he may be having more problems with the rough quality of the samples than the actual colors. So I sent him some samples from my last book showing the color samples next to the finished art.

I also showed him some finished artwork from other artists along the same lines of what I was envisioning. SO at this point we both agreed that the pastels weren't quit right and I think the finished art of other artists helped to communicate what I intended with my crude color samples. Now I just needed to figure out how to get from our current state of limbo into some colors that would accurately represent what I mean without actually going full scale into the final artwork. Then I got the idea to find reference photos online of rooms painted in various colors. i then cropped portions of the walls and stretched and fitted them to the samples in photoshop.

I feel this gave us samples that weren't too saturated, too light or too dark. The problem is that by the end of it I felt they were essentially the same color schemes I originally intended so I wasn't sure after all of this work if the client would be Any happier with these. HE WAS !!! SWEET! He chose 13 and 14 as the room gets lighter towards the end of the book when the sun starts to rise.

Now the situation wasn't completely resolved as I still had to show color samples for other objects in the room like the bed headboard, floor, blanket, lamp, night stand and rocking chair which are key features for part of the book. So I spent two more days working on the color samples below. This is a crazy amount of work to do for mere color samples but I was happy with how fast the drawing stage went and felt it will make the rest of the color samples much easier once we have one image done in more accurate colors to show the main elements. He's seen these and loves them and we are now trying to decide on our favorite or favorite combo. All of that work can only lead to a better final product int he long run!

A brief explanation of my color sample process for the art folk who may visit. Generally I try to use cheap papers where ever possible because at this time in my career I'm not all that worried about having color samples survive after I'm dead. So for acrylic or oils I have some thick paper I got from my grandpa seven years ago that works great for this purpose. For watercolor I use printing paper which is horrible for watercolors but gets a rough idea of color. I start by printing the final drawings onto the paper generally two spreads on each 8x10 sheet.

           In general I think it's a good idea to keep color samples extremely rough when working on a whole book and only get detailed if your working on one image. However I tend to personally feel like I'm going to lose clients unless I show them a bit of detail so i tend to get carried away. Probably comes from my first book in which the clients actually tried hard to have someone else add color to my drawings once they saw my rough color samples,LOL.

     I generally put some acrylic gloss medium on the paper to keep the paints from sinking in too much. Then you basically just go to town filling in rough colors trying to show main light source and colors of main objects. With acrylics and oil samples (and sometimes watercolor) I'm, able to spend about a half hour to an hour for the first sample for a single image. Then I scan that into the comp. and I paint different colors on top of the same sample, scan and repeat till I've exhausted my ideas.

     Then I almost always do even more samples once in photoshop. I play with the color sliders and contrast etc. to get all kinds of things I may not have come to on my own. I generally end up with around ten samples for each image in the book but I've had as many as 40 samples for one image before if you can believe it. Color seems to be that one area that clients aren't afraid to keep asking for more and more and more no matter how little they are paying. I never quit understood that but I'm constantly learning and know that this is the main area of my art that I still need to figure out away to streamline. After all we all know that the best part is the final art! FOr children's books the best part is seeing the final art in print : )

IF "Lesson"

2011-04-29T14:47:00.000-07:00

I do plan to post some other stuff eventually but for now here's another for Illustration Friday. The word this week is "Lesson".

This image is from my new book "The Little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday" which is due out in May and will be available on Amazon for kindle and as a paperback. I also did a video tutorial ( or "Lesson") for this illuatration which is available on this blog and on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/sneezingleopard?feature=mhsn

Illustration Friday- Bicycle

2011-04-26T05:56:00.000-07:00

My third Illustration Friday post. I found out that TONS of folks stop by the blog from Illustration Friday so now of course I'm hooked! Plus I just happen to have another preconcieved concept that goes along with this weeks word, "Bicylce".

This was originally a very quick pencil sketch I did in a sketchbook. Not sure what brought it on as it was a few years back. Now for this weeks IF I decided to make it a bit more of a finished ink line drawing. May color it someday if I ever find the time and may find a way to put it on some zazzle products. For the original sketch I wrote BORN TO BE WILD in some fluid large type, reminicent of John Handcock's signature. If I make this into t-shirts or something I would probably put some kind of humorous saying along those lines in there.

Vermont Oil Landscape Paintings

2011-04-19T14:45:00.000-07:00

I just realized I've never posted any of my landscape paintings to my blog. SO I guess now is as good a time as any since I finally got around to posting a few on my etsy shop for sale. http://www.etsy.com/shop/matthewgauvin?ref=si_shop and of course the snow is finally disapearing which means as soon as my current children's book is done I can get outside and do a few new lansdscapes!!!!

I really enjoy painting Landscapes as they give me the freedom to paint freely and make my own choices while getting me out of the studio for ala prima landscapes. Unfortunately that is something my children's book art is quit the opposite of most of the time. For children's books I do tons of thumbnails and idea sketches, search for tons of reference photos, consider borders and gutters and bleed and book sizes and text layout. Perhaps most importantly, I work with a client ,who generally has the last say in the final outcome as well as choosing between color choices, compositions and what goes in or stays out of each illustration.

In particular I enjoy seeing landscapes done in thick oil paint. Over the past year I have learned a lot about this from Brad Teare on his blog titled "Thick Paint". Whenever I have time my hope is to delve deeper into thick paint with my landscapes while I'm headed more and more into watercolors and digital for my children's book art.

Another artist who I would have to give credit to for helping me in my understanding of landscapes to some degree is Elizabeth Tolley. I picked up her book "Oil Painter's Solution Book : Landscapes" a couple years back and bring it out in the field with me. Excellent book on many levels!

Illustration Friday- Journey

2011-04-16T12:02:00.000-07:00

My second image for illustration friday. This is a previouse illustration from my book "The Caterpillar and the Express Train" in which a tiny caterpillar character goes on a long journey on a massive express train on a route between Boston and Miami.

more info about the book and book reading video can be found at http://thecaterpillarandtheexpresstrain.webs.com/

Birthday cake Line Drawing

2011-04-06T15:00:00.000-07:00

I have a few minutes to post something tonight but had a hard time figuring out what to post. I've got a ton of great new illustrations for my new book but want to wait til it comes out before posting those. I have a bunch of ladnscape paintings I did but want to wait til I get soem posted on Etsy. I've got a bunch of new character designs I want to post but need more time to write a bit about how I achieved various aged characters. I also have a bunch of in progress posts but all need more work. So for tonight I decide dto go ahead and post a line drawing I did of a birthday cake for my new book "The little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday". This cake line drawing got me thinking about the possibility of doing a coloring book for kids and so one of my clients and I are tossing around the idea.

I generally don't get a chance to do what I would consider finished line work like this. Usually my line drawigns only serve as a ground or boundary for me to paint over or within so I don't worry about having good looking energetic lines as much. Actually I used to do mostly oil paint so the lines wouldn't show at all but lately I have been thinking a Lot more about line quality as I moved into watercolors. I new I wanted line to be an iportant factor in my watercolor art as that is one of the main things my oil paintings were missing. SOmetimes I would love the drawing I did for an illustration but then loose that spontaneous energy when slaving over an oil painting in which the line ulitmately got covered up. It's much easier to swing your wrist with apencil and get a great arch than to do so with an paint brush loaded with thick opaque paint.

Recently I also got my first chapter book gig in which I will be doing lots of finished line work and now just foudn out about a second chapter book that I will be starting up in the next few months.

Illustration Friday, "Duet"

2011-04-01T11:35:00.000-07:00

This is my first ever Illustration friday submission! Lately I've seen artists everywhere participating in this websites weekly drawing exersize and have wanted to participate. I thought I would never have time to do so, but when I saw this weeks word "duet" I immediately had an idea come to mind and decided to stop all else and just sketch the idea to paper as fast as I could. Here's the result. I wish I had time to color it but maybe will do so later. Enjoy! (click for larger image)

Rough Sketches for my Monster Children's Book

2011-03-31T20:53:00.000-07:00

These are three of the rough draft drawings for my new Illustrated children's book "Allegra, friend of all Monsters" . I usually try not to post more finished artwork from books this early on, but in this case I'm soo excited about how this book is turning out that I simply can't resist posting some samples. What's soo exciting about this is that these are what I would consider to be the least action packed scenes of the book and yet I feel even these have so much great detail for the kids to enjoy. I keep telling people that with every book I do I can see my art progressing by leaps and bounds and that certainly rings true for this book. Of course I still have sooooooo much mroe to learn that it can be a bit overwhelming at times.

God has been so great to me in allowing me to continue down this path over these past few years. I can't tell you how many times I've felt I might need to get a different job that pays more substantially and yet God keeps providing just when I've tried everything I know how to do on my own. The past month has been a bit of a roller coaster ride not knowing what was in store next and getting down to the last few dollars in my bank account for the first time in my life. I'm generally extremely good at saving money and not over indulging even when I have money. So for me to nearly run out of money is beyond rare.

As Lent was just around the corner I knew I would have to make some tough decisions in regards to my time and money. Should I spend the day helping the Knights of Columbus with the fish fry?, should I go to stations of the cross and the Young adult Holy Hour?, should I spend the gas money to make it to Parish council meeting when surely they don't need me there anyway? In the end I decided that I needed to go to these things more than I needed to stay at home searching for my next gig. I had always heard that you put God first in all things and he will provide for you all that you need, for as the bible says " he knows all the hairs on your head" (Luke 12), "he cares enough to feed the birds in the sky and clothe the flowers of the field and so surely he will do the same for us" (Mat.6),

Now once again I find myself overwhelmed with work and just baffled at how these new clients searched me out. This isn't something I did. So anyway, just feeling extra thankful to be a children's book illustrator at this time in my life. I've been thinking a lot lately about how I tend to delete more of what I write than what gets posted or saved or sent. I suppose this second part is something I would delete as it's getting late and I would deem that this isn't anything I set out to write in the first place. I also generally wouldn't necessarily think an art blog is the best place to write about my faith in any way. But for tonight I'm choosing not to delete this and just to proclaim How amazing God truly is for those who trust in him and allow him to be their all in all, king of kings and Lord of Lords. I may not always get to be a children's book illustrator but I'm certain that whatever I do, so long as it's in the name of our Lord, it will be a great and joyful thing to do. Thanks for reading. God bless!

My First Watercolor Video Tutorial !

2011-03-23T12:42:00.000-07:00

Actually it's my first video tutorial of any kind but I wanted to put watercolor in there as I suspect it will draw more people from google searches. Basically I started recording videos of my art a few months back with oil paintings but most had my head in the shot for too long, so they never made the final cut,LOL. Then with my recent book I worked on small watercolor paintings and figured out a good method to avoid having the back of my head in the shot. Keeping my cats out of the shot is another story! (not this video but I may leave a cat in one of the others) Now after a lot of work I finally finished part one of the first video!

As this was my first video I tried to keep it rather simple and didn't get into too much explanation. However I do have another couple of images recorded from this book which I plan to try different ideas with. I also plan to eventually make more videos of various things as I progress in my career.

New Website Design

2011-03-22T10:31:00.000-07:00

A client recently went on vacation so I decided it would be the perfect time to finally fix up my website and work on various other neglected illustration related tasks. I'll tell you about some of those things separately as some aren't quit ready to reveal yet. But for this post I thought it would be neat to look back through the years at my website design.
This first image is from my website back in 2008 I think my first design was in about 2005 but for those first few years I kept to this basic design of having the resume on the home page. I have no idea what I was thinking,LOL. The "logo" had it's own issues as most people couldn't even figure out that it's supposed to be a birch tree.

my updated resume with a much cleaner design.

at some point along the way I decided it would be a good idea to throw a close cropped pic of myself up on the web header. Again, what was I thinking? LOL

finally I began to get the idea when I decided to put some close cropped illustration samples for the header.

Then I eventually decided to add one larger illustration to the home page to welcome guests. So the whole site and home page was black with these bright illustrations on it as I felt my illustrations looked good on black. It took me another year or so to realize that all of my favorite children's illustrators had very light themed websites. That realization then gave me the point of view to see my own website ina whole new light and realized it is waaaay too dark for a children's illustrator website.

This past week I did my most recent adjustments to my site and now have four buttons on the front page that link directly to various kinds of art in my portfolio. I may decide to change the images for those button over time but I have a feeling this concept will work the best to help folks get where they are going. I've also updated a number of other things to make navigation easier and have lots more in store to add interest to the site. This theme is still a bit dark but much better than before. I tried some lighter colors but realized it would take a complete redesign from scratch to get everything to look good on it.

When I say web design I should be clear that I am only using a template and uploading images and using apps. There are all kinds of things I would love to do but don't have the know how or money to do. One day if I ever get rich and famous I'll have lots of fun with the design.

Monster book Cover Design

2011-03-14T05:50:00.000-07:00

This week I finished off some thumbnail sketches for the cover design of my new book. Generally I wait till the other illustrations are underway before starting in on cover designs as it gives me more time to think it over. However this time I decided to try things a bit different so i can have the cover ready to promote the book earlier in the process.

click on the image and click a couple mroe times to enlarge to full size.

Basically the book is your typical (yet unique) monster book with a Little girl who's scared of monsters. By the end she is declared "Allegra, friend of all Monsters", which is the title of the book. I actually think a few of these could work well for the cover. I guess it just depends on what sort of interaction you want the characters to have. Allegra could still be scared of monsters to lead into the book, it could be just before she meets the monster, or it could be a scene that sort of represents the action in the book. The important thing is for it to be a strong, bold ,easily understood image that gets across the idea of the story immediately and will catch the eye of onlookers.

I don't think the cover has to strictly abide to the connotations that come with the title. It is generally understood that the cover shows the overall feeling of the book. These are for the front cover but depending on what the client chooses, we may or may not decide to have part of the illustration lead to the back cover. Or we could do a solid color with spot illustration on the back.

At this point I've only laid in rough ideas for the title but will figure out if that will be designed as hand drawn type or computer. My last two book covers (above) had hand drawn type which I've come to enjoy a lot more. Particularly since my clients tend to not spend the extra money for a good graphic designer. It takes a LOT more work to do my own illustrated title but it is waay worth it when the alternative is someone calling themselves a graphic designer, but who would put text over the main characters faces if left on their own. 40hrs of work can be destroyed in an hour of bad type layout. I've also come to feel that hand drawn title's have a larger appeal for children's books and maybe even lets people see that we went the extra mile in designing the book as a whole. You always hear, "don't judge a book by it's cover" but the fact is that people generally don't have much else to go on. Particularly in a world where big brick and mortar books stores like Border's are going out of buisness and Amazon is growing.

Free Peter Newell Children's Books

2011-03-12T05:54:00.000-08:00

One of the blogs I follow made mention of some free Newell books. I had never seen them before and enjoyed looking through th

em so figured others may as well. I have to say I'm slightly frustrated though because the book concepts are somewhat similar to one of the book ideas I've had for a couple years,LoL. Mine is different enough to be very unique though so maybe one day I'll have the luxury of illustrating my own ideas.
here's the link
http://www.nonsenselit.org/newell/

you can click on the different books and click through the PDFs page by page. So much fun to look at and read! Enjoy!
To purchase the books on amazon

Character Designs for New Children's Book

2011-03-10T07:04:00.000-08:00

Below I've posted a quick introduction to my two newest characters for my current book "Allegra, Friend to all Monsters". A ton of work went into the monster character in particular even if it's not necessarily evident from the final design. But collectively the client and I are happy with the final design.

I'm planning to post some of my process work for designing that character sometime to show how involved that process can be from the initial forty rough designs sketches up through the various fur patterns and appendages and body shapes .

I always wonder how different a given character would have turned out if I had the opportunity to design something completely on my own, without client guidance and having to stick to the words of a story. It's not that I feel I could necesarily do a better job on my own as I really do feel that client or art director input is vitally important to help me see things I can't see on my own. However I would be lying if I said I never wanted to chose other thumbnails or character designs over those chosen by clients. The important thing is that by the end of the book i usually agree full heartedly with the final product.

Artist Interview

2011-03-05T16:41:00.000-08:00

I'm posting an interview below that I did for the facebook group "Facebook Author's and Illustrators".
Tell us a little about yourself.

I Graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2006 with a BFA in Illustration. In my short career I’ve won a number of first place awards ranging from pumpkin carving designs and cartoon contests and into a congressional art competition, a duck stamp contest and an international aviation art contest. I make the art and my cats try to destroy it. I’m a Vermonter, an Artist and a Catholic. These three things have defined a large part of who I am for the balance of my life and I suspect will continue to do so for many years to come.

What is your latest published work?

“The caterpillar and the Express Train” is my latest published work. “Spirit Driver” and “The little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday” will be published soon (possibly by the time this interview is published).

Where e do you get your ideas from?

There are three things you must do in order to successfully generate ideas for your art.

1)consume plenty of ginkoboloba

2) Stand on your head, count to ten while holding your breath and think happy thoughts.

3) Sit very still in a metal chair with a hat made of tin foil placed perfectly over the back of your skull.

If none of these work for you, continue reading.

In reality there are no sure fire ways to get great ideas. In a sense they come to you when you are ready to receive them and each person prepares themselves to receive ideas in different ways. Since I’m an artist I tend to think of things visually, so my thought process is mostly based on visual observation. Some methods for generating ideas include.

1)Mind/Idea Web- write a project related word on paper and build similar words around it.

2) Observation- Observe nature and real objects to build your own ideas off. The best artists I know create magical worlds, objects and creatures by starting from things in the real world.

3)Do something to it!- Take a drawing or idea and do something to it, add to it again, subtract from it, do something else to it. Don’t settle on your initial idea or drawing, keep changing it until you feel you have created something truly unique.

4)Images- I generally get ideas flowing by looking through tons of images done by other artists. The idea isn’t to copy other artists but just to flip through tons of images and sketch any idea that come to you. The other day I was stuck on a cover title design for a book and started looking through images. In that process I saw an illustration of a kid with his mouth wide open. I realized his head and mouth created an “O” shape. So from there the ideas started flowing for how I could incorporate the main character into the title of the book cover.

5) The Internet- This is a great way to generate ideas because it’s kind of like having an automatic mind idea web at your finger tips. You type in a word and click search to reveal all kinds of words, pictures and ideas that you may not otherwise think of. I go on forums, blogs, and art websites constantly in search of something to spark an idea in my mind.

6) friends/family- sometimes people are afraid to use a friends idea but friends are often hanging around suggesting solutions to our problems whether we ask them to or not. Generally they want us to use their idea. I say if you have their permission, then go ahead and use the idea, if it’s a good one. In fact none of my children’s books illustrations are done entirely on my own ideas. I send tons of sketches and versions of ideas to authors and work back and forth with them based on their feedback. So the end result is always meant to be something we can both (and hopefully all the readers as well) can relate to and enjoy.

7)Relax- Some of my best ideas come when I’m almost asleep or when I’m doing something mundane.

What are you working on right now?

I’m currently finishing up a children’s book called “The little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday” and beginning work on a book called “Allegra, Friend of All Monsters”.

Do you have any tips or advice for aspiring illustrators?

The number one thing I can suggest is to build a website or at least a blog to post your art. No one will hire you if they can’t see your work samples. I would also say it’s important to constantly promote yourself and search for your next gig while working on your current gig so you won’t be out of work for two months in between each project. Do your best in college or in your current state to make the best art you can, so that when you branch out into Illustration as a full time career, you will already have some great pieces to show to potential clients and not just some paintings of fruit and nudes. Learn character design and figure drawing while you have the time. Do your best on even the smallest things like logos as it may lead to more but don’t do work for free outside of competitions. Even most art competitions are debatable as many are just out to get your money. Winning competitions has kept me in business but I have also lost my fair share of money trying out some sketchy online art competitions.

Do you have a crazy story about an aspect of the illustrator’s life, perhaps from a school visit or event?

The first children’s book I ever worked on was with two guys who lived about an hour away from my apartment. I eventually moved closer to them but before the move they had already set me up inside an old convent which I used as my studio for about three months. There was a catholic school attached to the convent and a new church being built next door. The convent was on the third floor. I found myself trying to get into the building either before the kids and construction workers arrived or in between lunch breaks and recess as none of the teachers knew who I was. So for a couple of months I actually ended up sleeping in the old abandoned convent at nights and working all day throughout the day. There was a room filled with old children’s books which hadn’t yet been relocated to the school’s library. So some days I would sit up there and just read through this mound of books. Every now and then I would hear kids running around in the convent hallways unattended by teachers after school. So I eventually started keeping the door shut to the room I was in. I remember more than once one of the kids would get curious and try to open the door. One time I must have left it unlatched as a small boy lurched into the room saying “I wonder what’s in here”. Of course he had no idea I would be in there with my large headphones on, rubber gloves, a darth vadar respirator mask (I was using oil paints in an enclosed room), my crazy long hair sticking up everywhere and my ripped clothes covered in paint. All I remember is that I barely made a move and the boy nearly jumped out of his skin and went running back to his buddies. About a week later some boy scouts ran up the stairs and passed my “studio” as I heard one boy exclaim “that’s where I saw the ghost!”

Is there anything else you’d like to add, such as a website or blog?

First I want to sincerely thank you Simon for the work you do for this group and anyone who has taken the time to actually read about my life and passion of being an illustrator. My personal website is www.matthewgauvin.com , book website- www.thecaterpillarandtheexpresstrain.webs.com/ , blog- http://matthewgauvin.blogspot.com/ , zazzle store- www.zazzle.com/sneezingleopard*, youtube where I hope to post more art tutorial videos soon - www.youtube.com/watch?V=gQPcuzCCIDK google me and you’re sure to find me in a number of other places as well.

How to Have an Online Presence

2011-03-02T07:08:00.000-08:00

          I'm taking the day off from illustrating books in order to catch up on a few neglected illustration business related tasks. Sooner or later you can expect to see an increase in blog posts, update my illustration website with recent work, my Etsy Shop with some of my landscape paintings, additions to my Zazzle Store and my number one goal is to finally edit some art tutorial videos I started a month ago to post on my YouTube Channel.
     Each of these things are great ways to alert your followers and fans to updates and to make a bit of extra income from your illustrations. None of them will generate a ton of income without putting a ton of work into them to begin with. Blogs can be monetized by becoming an amazon associate and things of that sort, websites can be used to sell your art and products and services, Etsy of course can be used for selling your original art products, zazzle is great for putting digital images of your art onto various products in a POD format yet with a quality result for sale and youtube is a huge way to get people interested in your art and products. For me they all tend to take a back seat to actually creating the art but even just the little work I have put into them has brought some results. I just finished my previous book and am a ways into my current book so I'm hoping I will finally be able to steal a bit of time for such tasks as these. I'm on tons of other art websites but the above few are probably the most important for my promotional needs.

     Recently
-One of my favorite children's digital artists, Dani Jones* launched a website called the illustrated section in which she sells the works of various artists in digital PDF format for e-readers. (ipad, nook, kindle, computer, iPhone, or just about any other electronic device.) She excepts most any art books from individual artists so long as it follows certain guidelines, which probably explains why she accepted My book The Caterpillar and the Express Train there are also FREE books available on the site!

- I participated in an illustrator interview for the facebook group "facebook Author's and Illustrators". The interview was posted about a week ago at this link.

- The author of my caterpillar book discovered an interesting review of the book online on this blog in which our train character was compared to Thomas the train on acid.

*Dani Jones

How to Draw the Human Figure from Your Imagination

2011-02-28T19:23:00.000-08:00

I have soooooooo many posts I've been wanting to put into blog form if I can ever get the time. I think the next chance I get I'm going to take a day off and just write all of them down and then post them every couple of weeks. At the end of this post I've linked to an amazing figure drawing tutorial series. Below I've posted one of the images from my new book coming out soon, "The Little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday". The whole book largely focoused on the human figure in wild perspectives, ethnicities, ages, and poses. So I deffinetly wish I could have purchased the full series of figure drawing tutorials before doing that book. instead I had to struggle through and even strike the pose myself a few times.

For tonight I remembered a website I came across a while back that looked like the number one thing that pretty much any illustrator of any kind would definitely need and desire to become a better illustrator in strides. The website does an amazing job of giving short lessons and video tutorials on how to draw the human figure from your imagination. It is by far the best resource I have found on this subject to date. So here it is http://www.alienthink.com/inventiontocompletehumanbeing.blogspot.html There are dvds and downloads that can be purchased or you can just watch the free tutorials ont eh website and learn a ton just from those. Enjoy!!! I haven't bought them myself yet as I haven't had the money but will do so the first chance I get.

Monster Character Designs

2011-01-10T06:44:00.000-08:00

click to enlarge

Please vote at left on which monster design is your favorite. These are just the very first rough draft of monster samples for my new book "Allegra, Friend of all Monsters". I will be narrowing these down to about three and then experimenting a bunch more with those three to get interesting variations and really push the design to it's fullest potential. Actually I'm hoping my client will narrow it dow to his favorite but none the less I would love to hear other peopl's opinions.

I do intend to play around more with all of the features, the eyes, ears, nose, mouth etc. placement on head, size, style. look like but want to narrow it down to a rough body type first. Then I will also probably play around more with the size relationships of the body parts. Maybe he will have huge arms dragging on the floor, or a tiny head with huge body or huge head with tiny body. But obviously I don't have time to try those options out on all of these samples. So help me narrow it down. The monster in the book is supposed to be about three feet tall, green, friendly and fuzzy. Some of these look too much like actual animals rather than monsters and some may get close to known charcters without me being aware of it. So please feel free to mention that as well in the comments.

To see the final character desing click here

Weird Mediums II

2011-01-06T08:04:00.000-08:00

For a previous post about weird mediums go HEre

Often times I am painting and get frustrated in trying to paint the whites of a characters eye with a brush that won't cooraperate or trying to get the fingers on a hand painted just right at a small size. Those frustrations are nothing compared to the sculpture art below!

How awesome that someone would think to turn trash into art. It's been done plenty before with old hubcaps, found stuff murals and such but this is waay cooler!

Since the first time I saw sand art it amazed me. SO simple looking and yet so beautiful when pared with music and story and animation. The light shinging up behidn it reminds me of when I would put my oil paintings against a windo and see the light shinging thorugh creating unexpected patterns of light and a brightness and life in the art.

I've posted about eclectic asylum art before but he's worth anothe rpost because he has some great stuff.

well, time for lunch, that's all for now.

New Illustrated Zazzle Products

2010-12-02T17:45:00.000-08:00

A few years back I started posting items to my own zazzle store in an attempt to make a few extra bucks on the side. At the time I don't think I realized how few extra bucks that would make,LOL. But recently I got a second wind and decided to start making some new designs for their new iPhone 4 cases and iPad cases along with some other products. Actually all of these illustrations are ones I did for other projects. One day I would like to see what I could come up with for ideas if I was to sit down and do my best to design a pair of shoes or a tie or t-shirt with that being the end product in mind. Regardless, I think I have a couple of interesting and funky designs that could be a hit amongst the right crowd. I have sold some items and enjoy making them so that is what counts for now. Head on over and check out some of my designs! www.zazzle.com/sneezingleopard*

How to Make Models and Maquetts

2010-11-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

About a month ago I was reading through James Gurney's blog (http://www.gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/) and came across one of his great posts on how to make models as reference for illustrations. He got the info from Dragan Bibin's blog (http://draganbibin.blogspot.com/2010/09/maquettes.html) for this particular method. They both made it sound so helpfull, cheap and easy that I wanted to give it a try for myself on my recent dinosaur illustration. Below is a series of pictures showing the process. You start by making a basic armature of the subject with aluminum wire. build bulk onto that with aluminum foil which is then covered with masking tape to give the gesso something to hold onto. I wasn't going for a super detailed look so for the most part I was happy with the structure after the masking tape stage. However you can also go on to add wads of cotton saturated with acrylic gesso which is easily shaped with a small brush. I did do a bit of this and was surprised at just how easy it was to get detail with this method. Now you cover the whole thing in acrylic gesso and let it dry. From here you can chose to use it as is or paint in the rough colors of the subject as I did.

Next I was bale to get into the business of lighting the whole set up as I wanted it in the final illustration. The idea is to allow these models to show you where the light hits the forms. For this Dino illustration I needed light coming from below (the rainbow road), and light coming form two weapons in the characters hands and from behind (the black hole).

The final illustration is below. Click on the image for a larger view

Other posts on this illustration here and here and here

Finished Dino Illustration

2010-11-03T18:03:00.000-07:00

CLICK THE IMAGE FOR LARGER VIEW

I'm finally near finish with the dino illustration. I'm sure the client will still want a few minor fixes to the faces and such but overall it is done. 121 hours to date. WOW! It's times like this that I wish I didn't keep such close track of how much time these illustrations take. Actually this time isn't accurate because for a good part of the painting process I was recording video to make a video demonstration. At first I was only getting about twelve minutes of recording at a time and I kept having to stop and upload the vid to my computer every time it stopped. Needless to say I stopped recording at some point. Mostly I stopped because the video was coming out beyond terrible. The painting is larger than 24"x36" and had some weird light glare issues on the video and I kept stepping in front of the shot. I might still try to salvage some of the video but may just take the time to make some good tutorials on the topics that the video would have touched upon. Painting metal, painting space and stars etc. So for now I'm just posting the near finished product. I do have some good photos of the painting process and models I made of the dinos. Hopefully some good info that will help others.

Color and Composition Samples

2010-10-08T13:32:00.000-07:00

WHile working on the color samples for a recent illustration I saw a couple of composition issues that were bugging me. The sword was going off the top edge of the canvas and almost touching the larger planet. This sort of thing creates a tension and draws attention to that area. I also don't like how the sword is basically pointing the viewers eyes right off the canvas. SO I made a couple of new composition samples posted below. The first oen still has an issue with the sword and the top edge fo the canvas and the second one just seems to have too much space. I like the closeness of the horizontal versions personally.
click on the images for larger views

Below are the colors samples. Basically I create these by printing the drawing onto thick 8"x11"paper and cover the print in liquitex matte gel medium. The gell keeps the paint from effecting the ink. Then I jump into painting my initial color ideas with acrylic paint. The first color sample takes anywhere from an hour to four hours depending on how complex the painting is. I think this image took two or three hours. Then I scan it into the computer.

Now I am free to change things in the sample working directly on top of the prvious sample. That way it only takes a few minutes to make small changes and scan again, I keep doing this until I feel I have exhausted the ideas I want ot try. By this point I have 5-10 samples. Now I go into photoshop and make duplicates of some to experiment even more by moving color sliders around and even saturation and contrast. Sometimes I might want to just effect the background so I make aduplicate and erase aroudn the foreground elements. I then throw this foreground over the background on the copy. Now I can select the foreground or background layer and make adjustments to each seperately. By this point I may have as many as twenty differnt samples but I begin to see some that I really don't like or that are just so similar to others that it would only be annoying to the clients trying to see the differences. SO I chose those that I feel need to be seen by the client and put them into one file like the one below, numbering each one.

Dinosaurs in outer Space Background

2010-09-30T10:24:00.000-07:00

An updated sketch juxtaposed over some reference photos for the background and a bit of photoshop mixed in. This is roughly how the client wants the background to look and will help me in working out the final Illustration.

Process Sketch for dinosaurs in Outer Spcae

2010-09-28T09:48:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I've posted. I've been too busy to post about the topics I have been wanting to. Lately I've seen a lot of blogs where artists just post in process sketches. Since I love seeing that sort of thing I figured I may as well do a bit of that. SO here's a really bizarre piece I've been working on and having a lot of fun with. Still a long way to go.

Samples from my Current Book in Process

2010-05-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

(CLICK ont he images below to get larger views) I finally have some proof that I have been busy working on a new book over the past six months! Below I'm posting a bunch of images taken from some of the process of the new book. This book will be published by Wind RIdge Publishing in Vermont as soon as the illustrations are done. First up is the Character turn-around of the head for one of the main characters in the book.
Below is a character lineup of all of the characters in the color sample stage where I got a feel for how the faces would be painted and the colors of their clothing.

Below is one of the spot illustrations from the book. Not 100% done yet but close.

Below are a couple of the earlier illustrations in the book, also not 100% done yet. The faces in these are just rough lay in and will be fixed later.

Below is a close up of the dog character (Jake) as he sticks his head out the window and gets a good look at the car wheels.

Below is some of the process work for one of the illustrations. I've got some character sketches, background sketch, and one of the color samples for the scene.

Long Book Reading Video

2010-05-08T12:45:00.000-07:00

I am finally getting around to posting this full length video of the book reading with illustrations and a bit of animation and noises mixed in. Enjoy!

What's in a grey? : Making Concrete Observations

2010-05-03T10:46:00.000-07:00

Wow! Has it really been so long since my last Post? Sorry, I've been doing a ton of work with my current children's book and still marketing my previous book. I finished off the longer video for that book a while back but never had a chance to uplaod it to this blog.
I've had a ton of ideas for topics I want to blog about but they are all quit time consuming ideas to put together. For today I decided to lay out my observations on the color grey as seen in the natural outdoors and as effected by light and shade. A friend of mine used to use black and white directly from the tube to make his greys for roads, concrete, metalic objects etc. He would often even make large areas of color in one uniform tone and hue across an area of space in his images. I'm not saying that is necisarily a bad thing as he did get many comments of approval of his art. However in my own observations I've noticed that this sort of application of color is often not true to nature. In the real world colors and surfaces get lighter as they recede in space and they tend to get cooler as they recede. Shadows will also be cooler than areas hit by light. You can get a good representation and create the appropriate value and contrast to form objects in an image just by using a monochromatic color scheme and even just with black and white. However I have found that my children's book illustrations are enhanced by exagerating colors.

Below are a few photos with concrete, sidewalks, pavement, roads etc which are generally thought in the mind to be just plain grey. In the center of the images I have extracted bits of the "greys" from the surrounding image to make it easier for us to see exactly what colors are in those greys. Things that would effect the colors are the time of day, the amount of light, the source of light, nearby objects which bounce color into the shadows etc.

Below is one example of one of my color samples of an illustration I will be painting soon. I did a number of samples for this and a couple just went with various values of grey worked from black and white. That may have worked fine for some applications but both the author and I agree that it just won't do for our children's book as this image would seem too dull in relation to the other images in the book. The sample below has a grey interior to a car which I have infused colors into and yet still read as grey in the overall picture. You can get these kinds fo greys by mixing complementary colors together and adding white. I wanted the areas nearest the sources of light (windows) to be warmer and the darker and deeper nooks and cranies take on more of a purple hue.
The image below is another image I'm working on for the same book as the above image. I do still have a lot I want to work on for these grey areas but I think this image will still work to get my point across. To the right you can see some areas I cropped out of the image and then crystalized in photoshop to help see the colors in the greys. In the concrete oning above the doorway, my goal was to have the area be dark enough to suggest not much sunlight is getting under there, and yet I also wanted to have some reflected light from the building effecting the color of the concrete. Then just to tie things in a bit better i decided to take some of the purple from below and work it into the top of the image. The concrete walkway admitedly overdoes the purple and I do plan to desaturate that. I don't want it to compete with the girls sweater and it is also currently popping off the canvas.
This last image comes from my previous book. I did about five or six color smaples of this image having bluer tones and greener tones in the concrete. In order to tie the whole image together, the author and I decided on the below color scheme. The color scheme in this image is quit warm with mere accents of cool color making the warms dance. I treated this concrete almost the way you would treat a water scene in which the sky colors are reflected onto the water top. A grey made with black and white would probably look great but I feel the colors I used below have more to say about the mood and atmosphere I was trying to achieve than black would be able to accomplish.

2010-03-17T21:25:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post because I've been extremely busy with a new booka nd doing lots of marketing work for my previous published book. I worked for a while on the book website and I'm currently working on the book reading video. This is a short sample of that and I hope to have the full version finished soon.Enjoy!

My Favorite Illustrators and Painters

2010-01-26T07:37:00.000-08:00

Yet another blog post I’ve wanted to put in writing for some time now but haven’t been able to find time. Below is a list of websites for some of the artists who have inspired me and kept me moving forward in my career. If I hadn’t found these artists, I’m sure I would have made precious little improvement with my art over the past few years since graduating from Mass Art. Below is a vast array of artists from highly textured oil portrait painters, to highly imaginative fantasy art, fantastic children’s book illustrations and a few breathtaking landscape painters. All of these styles have pushed me and prodded as I struggle to discover my own voice in the world of art and push forward with some sort of unique style. I wrote a bit about the first few and ultimately had to resort to just listing websites for the rest. I wanted to include some images of some of there work but I don’t have time to send requests to each artist or even just to collect the images and upload them. I hope you’ll journey over yourselves and feel free to let me know of some of your favorites in the comments. Enjoy!

One of my recent favorite illustrators would have to be Richard Watson. his website http://www.richardjessewatson.com/ The website doesn't do his work justice since he uses lots of texture which is more evident in the books than on the website.

An illustrator I found about four years ago is James Gurney. He is probably my biggest inspiration since graduating from massart. I think I first saw his work displayed at some illustrators guild museum or something. He is the illustrator and author of a series known as Dinotopia which was made into movies and I think cartoons as well. He spent a lot of time working on site with national Geographic’s doing illustrations for them. He also does tons of prep work and makes sculptures of his characters before starting a painting. I wish I could put as much time into my work as he does and I wish I had all of the ala prima painting experience behind me that he has. Take a look at his painting gallery. I unfortunately have to work mostly from photo references for now but he uses lots of live references, gets live models, paints landscapes from life, on and on. When painting dinosaurs he uses real life animals with similar textures as reference. For example he’ll look to elephant skin and crocodiles to get the textures for dino skin. His use of color, compositions, attention to detail, original ideas/concepts, ability to merge the imagination with the real world are just outstanding. He shows me what true passion mixed with illustration can be. When talking about the Dinotopia series he mentions that he loves the concept because he gets to bring dinosaurs back to life and put them beside humans. He sees it as painting history more so than fantasy or sci-fi. As a kid he was always fascinated by dinos because he knew they were once alive not like unicorns, dragons, trolls, and vampires. His website. . . http://www.jamesgurney.com/index.html

Ok, you may not have heard of the others so far but I know you’ve heard of Norman Rockwell. He is definitely one of my favorites. I grew up with his work all around me because my grandfather has a huge collection of his. He actually has so many prints and mugs, and plates and calendars and other objects with Rockwell paintings that he could open his own museum. I have a few norman Rockwell collectors books that I look through every now and then for inspiration. I also went to the Norman Rockwell museum a couple years ago. His figures are some of the best I’ve come across, he paints some of the best facial expressions I’ve come across, he paints hands better than I could ever dream of doing, his themes are touching, timeless and meaningful, everything in the painting belongs there and helps tell the story, he tells stories better than most illustrators. There are many website but this seems to be the main one http://www.normanrockwell.com/index.php .

One of my favorites for book design and layout is David Wiesner. He is also amazing for his ability to tell the entire story without words. You’ve probably come across his book called “Tuesday”. It’s all illustrations. Granted the story is nothing spectacular but it’s fun for the kids and adults. He’s also got a knack for point of view perspective where he can take you from the top of a clock tower looking down on the town in one image and bring you down into a swamp with the turtles in another image. For part of his process he talks about how he gets his ideas. He makes and interesting image then asks the question what happened before and after that particular scene. He can then build an entire book around it. http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/authors/wiesner/home.html

Another great story teller through illustrations is Chris Van Allsburg. He’s the only illustrator I know of who made an entire children’s book out of graphite drawings, no color. He works with so little and yet he gives the reader so much. My favorite images of is are those with glowing aspects. You may have seen his image with the woman cutting a glowing pumpkin with a knife. I mostly know him for his book “ The Mysteries of Harris Burdick” http://www.chrisvanallsburg.com/flash.html

One of my favorite painters is Scott Burdick. He is one of the ones who helped me to love texture in painting (although my clients tend to hate texture so I do very little with it for now). He’s also great with light and shadow on forms. His website is amazing. His wife, susan Lyon, is also really good and is also featured on this site. Be sure to click on some of the images for close-ups. I love that they show there work back years ago so you can see how they progressed.
Another somewhat recent favorite is holly hobbie the author and writer of the toot and puddle series. She has amazing layout skills, Great range of medium in each book. Unique painting technique and great color harmony. She has cute and simple characters with terrific stories to back them up. http://www.scottburdick.com/

Some other great ones who I don’t have time to write about and may be worth your time to have a look at.
William Scott Jennings http://www.wsjennings.com/jennings/home.phtml
Charles Kerins http://www.charleskerins.com/
David Renn http://www.davidrenn.com.au/index.html

http://www.jcleyendecker.blogspot.com/
http://www.xmission.com/~emailbox/glenda/bierstadt/bierstadt3.html
http://www.richardschmid.com/2000_page.htm
http://www.christensenstudio.com/Artist.asp?ArtistID=15825&Akey=TVKNT9F5
http://turtleart.net/artists.php
http://www.davidrenn.com/
http://www.manchess.com/
http://www.jbmonge.com/Feerie1JB.php
http://www.jenniferemery.com/
http://www.jodylee.org/Version2/Gallery/Paintings/GraniteShield.html
http://www.johnclapp.com/artw_pages/bookart_pages/bookart_main.html
http://www.jwwaterhouse.com/view.cfm?recordid=66
http://www.laynejohnson.com/kitten.htm
http://www.deborahsecor.com/landscapes.html
http://www.ripsqueak.com/rips-first-flight-p-322.html
http://www.paulaford.com/
http://www.pino-artist.com/pino-art-collections.html
http://www.terryshoffner.com/index.html
http://www.dandossantos.com/mock.html
http://www.paulmurray.com/index.html
http://phyllishornungpeacock.com/index.htm
http://www.dvpalumbo.com/index.html
http://www.mortkunstler.com/
http://www.trisharomance.com/home.html
http://www.diterlizzi.com/
http://www.tor.com/index.php?option=com_phocagallery&view=galleries&start=g
http://www.graemebase.com/Home.cfm
http://www.walterwick.com/index.htm
http://www.drewstruzan.com/
http://www.morganweistling.com/
http://www.timbowers.com/
http://www.vareikafinearts.com/showexhibit.asp?ID=1

My New Book is Available!

2010-01-14T13:39:00.001-08:00

A few weeks ago I wrote about my book which was scheduled to come out before Christmas but I forgot to write again wehn it actually became available. You can now buy the book on Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/Caterpillar-Express-Train-Jeremy-Foster-Fell/dp/0984347704/

or to get it signed or to purchase a whistle with the book you can go to my website http://www.matthewgauvin.com/ or the book website http://thecaterpillarandtheexpresstrain.webs.com/

Thanks!

Reference for Cars

2009-12-30T13:51:00.000-08:00

Today I find myself looking through tons of photos of cars trying to find the perfect match for my new book. After some time searching I discovered some great websites that actually sell cheap die cast models of cars. I know this tid bit of info will be extremely helpful later down the road with other projects and with this one. Typically I will be forced to work from photos for most everything I illustrate. Often for more complex objects and characters I have to make models in order to see how the light falls across forms. However I knew there would be no easy way to create my own model of a car from scratch so buying a diecast model should be the perfect solution. Mainly I want to share a couple of links for that as I'm sure others will eventually be faced with a simialr problem.

Secondly I didscovered some amazing diecast models of much older cars like this fire truck which would be a lot harder to go see in person. Buying a diecast could be the solution to doing historical paintings of rare cars. I could even see these older model cars being a great starting point or inspiration for creating futuristic car designs. The older cars have way more class and style than all the new stuff they are coming out with. One link to cheap die cast cars is http://www.diecastmodelswholesale.com/servlet/the-Fire-Engine-Diecast/Categories

there are plenty of websites I found that sell these sorts of things but this is one of the best I found so far. Secondly I found a great website with links to paper models of objects including things like cars, buildings, insects etc. One of the cooler ones I found was this hornet model. You can go on there and download the whole thing, cut it out and glue it together. The link, http://images.google.ca/imgres?imgurl=http://papermodels.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/suzuki-car-sx4-wrc.jpg&imgrefurl=http://papermodels.wordpress.com/category/cars-tractors-boxes-rally-f1/&usg=__FBp_c7hbp1c0KrwQO88au1a7oAk=&h=338&w=450&sz=59&hl=en&start=16&sig2=UeRo2r1ckeCUM3LnN46Lhw&um=1&tbnid=UEUboawEmWx_jM:&tbnh=95&tbnw=127&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsuzuki%2Bmodel%2Bcar%26hl%3Den%26rlz%3D1T4GWYE_enUS345US345%26sa%3DN%26um%3D1&ei=H80aS4jWO47M8Qa8ueHlAw

Free Andrew Loomis Books!!!

2009-12-19T18:53:00.000-08:00

If you're an illustrator and haven't heard of Andrew Loomis then you will certainly be glad you stopped by this blog. I grew up in a home that was pretty much illiterate (or maybe that should be ill-art-erate) when it comes to art. My exposure to art was my older sisters traced drawings of cartoon characters. I was lucky to have a grandfather who loved art at my age and actually has a HUGE Norman Rockwell collection which he loved to show us whenever we stopped by for a visit. Since art college he has even opened me up to a whole world of his art he created for a mail-art instruction school he participated in at my age. In my senior year of high school I was one of two people in my whole art class who had a hard time passing an art history test my teacher gave us. As I left for college all I knew is that I loved making art and I wasn't too bad at it either.

Unfortunately my poor knowledge of art history persisted throughout most of my art college experience despite the required art history courses for which I actually bought and read the huge text books for. I just couldn't grasp the stuff. However I eventually got tiered of not having an answer to the question that would continually pop up the more I progressed in my art. First people would ask what college I go to or what I do for a living and when I told them I'm an artist they immediately ask who my favorite artists are. For the longest time the only name I had to throw at them was Norman Rockwell. Sure I knew of Picasso, Monet, Gauguin, Michelangelo, etc. etc. and I grew up on Bob Ross and some dude who drew cartoon characters on tv, but I was never really really inspired by any of them. Not initially anyway.

The point I'm trying to make is that I finally broke this bad habit and came across some spectacular artists who i admire and learn from on a regular basis. Without these influences I don't feel i would have been able to pursue my art in the way I have, creating children's books, commissioned paintings, logos etc. So my hope in writing this is that one young artist who may be in a similar situation would start the whole process early. Look at tons of art and find out who is your favorite. Then buy their books, read their blogs, watch their videos, learn from them. Soon I hope to have the time to post a list of artists who I look to for inspiration and guidance whenever I'm faced with challenges. For now I Just want to open your eyes to one artist in particular as he has taught many of the greatest illustrators with his books. That is Andrew Loomis. Unfortunately his books are out of print but luckily I found them for free in PDF form here http://www.alexhays.com/loomis/ . So go download them and start reading! More artists and great resources to come.

Weird mediums

2009-12-04T10:36:00.000-08:00

Weird mediums
This is a blog post I have been meaning to write for a while now. I just haven’t been able to find the time. Since I still have not time I’m just going to post a bunch of photos and links from various artists using weird mediums to create art and not say much about each one. Some of these artists have really done some terrific art and it’s worth the time to go check out more of their work.
For some great painted hand art and optical illusions check out http://visualfunhouse.com/body_paint/painted-hand-optical-illusions.html

Won Park makes some amazing money origami. http://orudorumagi11.deviantart.com/gallery/

Scott Wade makes art using dirt smudged around on the back windshield of cars. This is just one sample of his. Check out more at http://www.dirtycarart.com/

A guy on youtube by the screen name of Eclecticasylumart makes are with his food. One sample below shows an image draw with his fingers and BBQ sauce. It’s way more impressive when you watch him make the art before your eye so go check it out. HE uses other food too! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3pz2VgIM7E&feature=related

Eric Daigh was recently featured on the morning news for his pushpin art. Initially I found this to be pretty darn cool but then they showed his process and it kind of ruined it for me since he takes a photo and breaks it into pixels which he follows as a guide to place the pushpins. So I think I’ll stick with monet and van Gogh . http://daigh.com/

Nathan Sawaya sculpts with legos. You may have seen his art on the news as well as he was featured a couple of times over the past two years. http://brickartist.com/

Liu Bolin is known as the invisible man. He actually paints on his clothing and face to match whatever is behind him then spends hours getting a photo of him in just the right position to make himself blend into the background. One sample below, can you find him? Check out http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/5886805/The-invisible-man-Liu-Bolins-camouflage-artwork.html?image=17

Julian Beever uses chalk and concrete for his creations. At least two people have sent me a link to his site so far so I figure he needs to be included in this post. Below is one sample but you deff. Don’t want to miss out on the rest so check out http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/batman.html

Eric Grohe does murals as well but uses brick Walls for his canvas. http://www.ericgrohemurals.com/projects/diamond.html

And of course Edgar Mueller. (ice) http://www.metanamorph.com/

I plan to do separate blog posts on Sand castles, snow sculptures and Pumpkin carving when I find the time later down the road.

Pumkin Carving

2009-12-04T09:10:00.001-08:00

Last year I entered the Pumpkin Masters Carving Competition for the first time and surprised myself by winning second place in the faces category. I did a bunch of research on pumpkin carving techniques and set to work. That process produced "Enchanted Lady" pictured below.

So this year I couldn't pass up the opportunity to give it another go. I had to revisit some articles on carving techniques and discovered one sentence which changed my whole approach. One of the articles said something about how small details should be carved by taking away the skin and some pumpkin flesh but not carving all the way through. It also spoke of carving away a bunch of pumpkin from inside out to make the pumpkin walls thicker. This is common knowledge for anyone who does this on a regular basis but for me it was a revelation of sorts. Last years carving was the first I had done since childhood and I had always just assumed that carving all the way through was the way to go. Carving away the skin was almost like doing Scratch art. I also decided to work with a clamp light bulb on an extension cord placed inside the pumpkin while I carved so I knew exactly how much to carve away. I wouldn't advise this for young children or anything as the bulb gets hot but it was a ton of fun for me. Below is my carving for this year. The voting won't be for another month or so.

Every good carving needs a good stating place and this competition requires you send a copy of original carving design. SO below is my design. I never would have even considered drawing such tiny detail work if I had thought I would need to carve all the way through the pumpkin. I projected this design onto the pumpkin surface with an art projector I use for my illustrations, then drew it with a permanent pen that I tested before to be sure it wouldn't rub off when the pumpkin got wet pulp on it.

Fun fact: For some reason I seem to misspell the same words over and over again even when I know the correct spelling. "Pumpkin" is one of those words as I tend to spell it "pumkin". Every time you see that word in this post it was spelled wrong until iwent back to correct it.

Getting the Perfect Reference for Tricky Perspectives

2009-05-25T16:56:00.001-07:00

If you've ever had to illustrate objects or people from weird angles for a client or otherwise then you should find today's post quit helpful. I actually recently came across this dilemma with a few of the children's illustrations I've been working on for my recent book. In one illustration I wanted a view of passengers getting ready to board the train but the perspective is from that of an ity bitty caterpillar in the hub of one of the trains wheels. So I needed to figure out how to get reference image of people from a perspective below street level. One obvious option is to have people lie down and try to get a picture from below them. the trouble with this is that their clothing will look wrong because the folds don't have gravity effecting them. A similar option would be to actually put yourself in that particular position and take a picture. If you're doing an illustration from above someones head looking down on them at strange perspective then just get up on something high and get someone to pose for you. Both of these will most likely give you trouble with the way the camera has translated the foreshortened limbs. There are a couple of other options I have enjoyed playing around with that don't include those wooden dolls you get at the art store.
For a while I have referenced a site called www.posemaniacs.com where you will find tons of poses of computer sculpted models . The best part about this site is that you can rotate around the poses to see them from all sorts of angles.

Another great option for models of people and other objects like cars, helicopters, building etc. can be found at www.3divia.com . This site is just amazing because once again you get to rotate around the poses and the objects. You have to do a quick download of there software but I've found it useful so far. I've only used the free models but I can just imagine how amazing the others must be judging from the free samples. How often do you really get the chance to rent a helicopter and take a photo of a house from above anyway? obviously you could spend hours looking for reference online but you won't get to choose the exact point of perspective you want unless you draw it all out, happen to know a drafting software or own a helicopter.

There is also the whole area of creating your own physical models out of clay, paper mache, wood, found objects etc. This works pretty good for very specific characters you've designed for a project. For example you may design an alien with all kinds of strange limbs so the best option most likely is to build your own model. For one of my books I got to do a bunch of illustrations of Noah's ark so I decided to take a few hours to actually build a small replica out of wood, shown below.

One final option I've used is called google sketchup which you can actually download for free and legally. This program allows you to build things from the ground up and then you can rotate around, under, above, zoom in and out etc. The trouble is that you will have to spend a bit of time figuring out the software but it's actually not too hard. I actually used this program to redesign my studio room. Now you could go all out and by the expensive programs but who really has the money for those?

Art in the City

2009-04-13T12:57:00.000-07:00

For the past ten days I went out to Boston and New York for business and pleasure. Unfortunately I didn’t get to meet with publishers as I had originally intended but I did get quit a bit done. I started off in Boston where I had the awesome opportunity to speak with the massart senior illustration class about what life is like after graduation. I was lucky to have three other graduates at my side telling their stories as well. I had plenty of time in Boston to meet with friends and work out some illustration ideas while also leaving myself time to celebrate my birthday and holy week. Luckily I had some amazing friends who let me stay at there places over the eight days. Below is a sketch I did of the Boston skyline.

Then I headed off to New York. Below is a sketch I did in New York’s China town and a sketch of my accommodations at the Bowery white house hostel for two nights. It was basically like sleeping in a closet with a latticework ceiling and each room up against each other with very thin walls. Since it was only two nights, it was actually a fun experience. The showers and bathrooms in general were definitely a bit shady for me though. It reminded me of this one time I went to another school with my wrestling team in high school. They warned me not to drink the water there but I didn’t listen and ended up with the worst stomach pains. Then I found out that the bathroom stalls had no doors, in order to keep kids from doing drugs etc. Let’s just say that was a very uncomfortable night for me, LOL. For my second nights stay at the bowery in NY I came back from the Art Gallery in a dress shirt and dress pants. So there I am with my huge luggage and all dressed up staying in this tiny closet for the night. I swear they checked out my height before I came and made sure I got the room that was one inch too short. If that doesn’t say starving artist then I don’t know what does.

While in New York I met with more friends and attended a gallery show with my “Graduate Pinball” illustration featured in it. All I’ve got to say is that the show was awesome and exciting to be a part of. My painting won second place out of 35 artists, yeah!!! I’ve posted some photos of the show below.

Children's Illustration Process

2009-03-21T13:54:00.000-07:00

My process mentioned below is quite long because good children’s book illustration should go beyond what the written word says and go into a further dimension ,adding to the story. Some illustrators just make an image depicting the exact words of the text, which is fine in some cases, but I find that my favorite books demonstrate a give and take relationship between the words on the page and the images.

There are two main categories of children’s books, the picture book or story book. In short, picture books are supported by the pictures and would make no sense without them. Story books are held together by the story and the illustrations serve in a somewhat subordinate role. Neither of these should be limited to what the story tells us.
A picture book may say something like, “The apple was huge” and the image may show the apple taller than buildings and perhaps show workers loading large dump trucks with pieces of apple. A story book may say something like “ The bright red apple was larger than any building in town and the workers had to work day an night to remove the apple before the big day”. While the image would need to communicate these things, it’s still a good idea to add to the image. Perhaps as complicated as adding a huge worm in the apple, snapping at the workers and making their jobs harder, or as simple as adding a small but noticeable worm on a sidewalk, slithering away in horror of how big the apple is.

Thumbnails- The very first art I do after talking to a client about there project is the initial idea thumbnail sketch. I also take lots of notes from the children’s story and from the client on what they would like to see in the illustration. The notes make it easy for me to refer to specific colors mentioned for the scene, specific characters and objects mentioned in the story etc. Most of the smaller elements may not be incorporated into the illustration until the next drawing stage, but it’s good to keep them in the back of your mind. This first image is extremely rough as you can see below.

Then before doing any research I continue to make thumbnail sketches (smaller than a business card) , loosely putting my initial ideas on paper. This helps weed out the bad ideas and develop them into good ones. Generally clients have a very static idea in mind of how each image should look. That’s where it’s good to take notes on there thoughts, but then be sure to give them other unique and creative solutions that would work just as well or even better. This takes more time but it ensures you get fresh results instead of just the first idea that pops into your head. Generally the first idea you have isn’t necessarily the best or most unique. If you get stuck for ideas at this point try some of the tips from my post titled “Generating ideas and Inspiration.” Below you will see a few of the thumbnail sketches I did for my image “The Search for Rudy”. The clients asked for an image of Rudy sleeping behind a trash can in an alley, while kids and a helicopter are searching for him. In my thought process I figured it may be cool to have an image looking down on the town from the helicopter or a bell tower. This is also a good point to start drawing elements at different scales. You’ll notice the difference between the giraffe in 15 and 16. The clients loved these ideas but decided to stay with their original idea, so Rudy would be center stage.

Refined Sketch- Once they chose from about fifteen thumbnail sketches we go onto a more detailed sketch maybe two in which I include facial expressions, correct size relationships etc. when we narrow it down to one image I go into a much more detailed sketch. Sometimes I get reference photos before I even begin sketching the thumbnails but by the time I get to these final sketches I have to get even more references for the image.
References consist of googled images, movies, national Geographic’s, travel books, art books, figurines, textured fabrics, objects, nature etc. Take lots of photos, and use more than one model or more than one costume. In some cases I even make clay sculptures of characters, cardboard sculptures of buildings etc. to help get lighting right on the objects and to help draw characters in weird positions from any angle.

Value Sketch- Now I decide if I need to do a black and white shaded sketch or if I can go right to the color sketches. For this image I had a pretty good idea what the values should be and I did experiment a bit during the thumbnail stage. For the more complex images I almost always do a value sketch to make the color stage easier. Sometimes I do more than one of these for the client to choose from. I might have a sketch of a room interior and the shading will show if the room is lit or not among other things.

Color/Hue- Now that I have a final sketch that the client and I are happy with, I move on to color samples. The idea here is that you want to give yourself and the client a pretty good idea what the final overall color scheme will be. Don’t worry about the details at this point, you want to see what a purple shirt looks like up against the background colors, we don’t need to know the color of the buttons on the shirt. Experiment the same as you did with the thumbnail sketches. If you’re doing an illustration of a UFO it might be cool to have a greenish tint to a night sky rather than a dark blue or black. For one of my recent logo designs I did thirty color samples. For some tips and tricks with color check out my post titled color tips and tricks.

Once I have a refined sketch, a good value study, a good color sample and some photo reference to work from, I’m clear to go onto the final image. Generally I work on a pretty good size canvas around 18”x24”, so I usually use a projector to draw the final image onto the canvas. When I work with watercolor I usually work around 8”x11”, I find that sometimes it works nicely to print the drawing directly onto watercolor paper.

Generating Ideas and Inspiration

2009-03-21T13:50:00.000-07:00

There are three things you must do in order to successfully generate ideas for your art.
1)consume plenty of ginkoboloba
2) stand on your head, count to ten while holding your breath and think happy thoughts.
3) Sit very still in a metal chair with a hat made of tin foil placed perfectly over the back of your skull.

If none of these work for you, continue reading.

In reality there are no sure fire ways to get great ideas. In a sense they come to you when you are ready to receive them and each person prepares themselves to receive ideas in different ways. Since I’m an artist I tend to think of things visually, so the methods I’ve mentioned below are mostly based on visual observation.

mind/idea web- Most people have used these before for writing papers and other projects. The basic idea is you write down a starting word, then build a web of related words around that word, then build off from each of those words as far as you can. This process often generates ideas you may not have otherwise thought of.

Observation- This method for me primarily refers to observation of nature. When you think about it most inventions are things observed from nature. We see a duck with webbed feet and think “those are cool, I’ll make me some” and we get scuba diving flippers, we see a bird flying and create airplanes etc. Artists have also observed nature to create some amazing and imaginative scenes. The more you study nature the easier it will be for you to create imaginative worlds and creatures and objects that look and feel real. Ask any concept artist where there ideas come from and they will most likely tell you that the ideas started from observation of natural and man made objects. Even if they could create a castle without any physical observation of castles then they will at least resort to there memory bank of images they’ve seen in the past.

Do something to it- This is a method that evolves over time. Take an object or a drawing and do something to it. Do something else to it. Do something else to it. This is the method I generally use to design characters until they look just right. Most people get locked into there original ideas without ever seeing if it could evolve into something better. Check out my blog titled “Graduate Pinball Painting” to see an example of a simple cartoon I developed into a larger concept for a painting.

Images- I often use tons of images to jog my mind into thinking of ideas. As a visual thinker, it helps me to see lots of other images to start mapping out ideas for my own images. Most of the ideas we have start somewhere, as creators it’s our job to find that place to start. I often start by looking through old copies of illustration directories. I’m pretty sure you can get a free copy by going here http://www.dirill.com/ It’s also helpful to look through magazines, travel books, books about the topic you’re illustrating ,whatever works to jog your mind into action. Some of my best ideas come while I’m watching TV.

The internet- Even if you don’t happen to have tons of reference images in the form of magazines and books laying around you can always go to the internet for ideas. Find a good artist forum like http://www.conceptart.org/ , http://www.wetcanvas.com/ , http://www.artwanted.com/, http://www.deviantart.com/, or for images on particular subjects check out stock photos on sites like http://www.morguefile.com/ , http://www.corbis.com/ , etc. if you’re looking for pictures of animals you can find zoo websites like http://whozoo.org/gallerymain.htm . These are meant to generate ideas and help you draw particular elements. Don’t just find some photo and copy it.
Other Artists- One of my favorite places to get ideas and inspiration is to look at my favorite artists websites and read their blogs. Below are just a handful of all those who have inspired me and my art.

James Gurney http://www.jamesgurney.com/ http://www.gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/
Dani Jones http://danidraws.com/
Richard Watson http://www.richardjessewatson.com/
Dan Dossantos http://www.dandossantos.com/home.html
Tony Diterlizzi http://www.diterlizzi.com/
Scott Burdick http://www.scottburdick.com/

Relax- Stop trying so hard. Just relax and get away from the project for while. You may spend hours racking your brain in the studio trying to come up with good ideas and get nothing. Some of my best ideas come when I’m in bed almost asleep or when I’m walking along the sidewalk or something mundane. This does tend to happen more often when I have thought about a particular project for a while already.

Friends- Let others help you think of ideas. I think all too often artists have the mentality that they have to come up with all of the ideas or it’s not really there art. Well that really depends on what you’re talking about I guess. I wouldn’t think it’s a great idea for someone to come up with every last detail in one of your images but it never hurts to ask for help and to accept someone’s ideas when they come up with something good. Just be careful of intellectual property. If you rely heavily on someone else’s idea, then make sure they are fine with it first and give them credit where it’s due. In actuality there is often more than one mind involved in illustrating any given image in a children’s book, as mentioned in my blog discussing the process of children’s book illustration. Most of the time an illustrator is working with their client and whoever else the client shows the sketches to as well as whoever pops there head into the studio. Many people have there own opinions and ideas so I would suggest tapping into that whenever possible. Sometimes and outsider can think more clearly than someone who’s been working with an illustration for weeks. As annoying as this can be at times, it can also be helpful.

For more on how to think of ideas check out http://www.princetonol.com/groups/iad/Files/ideas.htm

Color Tips and Tricks

2009-03-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

-Use a computer program like Adobe photoshop to tile your image onto a page and print
off a bunch on an appropriate paper. This gives you a guideline to place colors onto.
- Determine your light and value. establish lighting and emphasis. What color are the light sources? (e.g. warm daylight or cool night light?) How does the light/shadows affect the local color of the objects in my painting? (e.g. colors are usually brighter and warmer in light, darker and cooler in shadow)
- Educate yourself on the basic qualities of color. know some basic terms (hue, saturation, value, etc.) and relationships (monochromatic, analogous, complementary, etc.).
-Limit your color palette. If your understanding of color is a bit fuzzy, try limiting your palette to one red, one yellow, and one Blue along with white and black. From these you should be able to mix most any color you need.
-limit the amount of black you use. Before reaching for a tube of black paint, experiment with your own mixed blacks. Try mixing a dark purple with a dark brown. I would also suggest you never use any color directly from the tube especially black and white. Everything in the real world is affected by the light in the environment around it. Right now I have two pieces of paper on my desktop. One is close to a window and the other is closer to the lamp light. The one near the window is bluish white while the one near the lamp is a yellowish white.

-Play with color temperature. Ask yourself if you want to use dominantly warm or cool colors? Most illustrations will be predominantly one or the other. In the image below I knew I wanted a dominant cool color scheme because it takes place at night. Most of the time I try to make the main character either a complimentary color to the background or have a high contrast between the character and the background to make him/her stick out more. While a brick building has an orange tinge during the day, I wanted it to be more towards a dark, cool reddish purple color at night with the exception of where it’s being hit by artificial light.

If you don’t have a color wheel, then either make one or buy one and learn the warm side and cool side of the wheel. Also warm colors like red can slowly turn cool with more cool color added. For example, add blue to red and you get purple, which is a cool color. Add only a bit of blue to red and you get a cool red. This can be helpful in creating atmospheric perspective in paintings. Below you will see two examples of the same image. One has a cooler and unsaturated earth red floor which recedes in space making it look further below, while the other image shows the floor in a warm saturated red making that part of the image come forward which distracts us from the focal point.

-play with saturation. Most children’s book illustration is pretty high on the saturation scale because kids love bright bold colors. If you’re going for a more sophisticated look you may wish to use less saturated color in your image.

character designs

2009-02-26T21:22:00.000-08:00

I thought maybe some of you would enjoy seeing the initial sketches for the characters I have designed for variouse projects over the past few years. A great book on character design is "Creating Characters with Personality" by. Tom Bancroft. Some of these are influences by the clients and others are influenced by other artists and objects. For example, some of these robots were inspired by a cd player I had.

This hippo character was my own design but the guidlines put forth that he had to be a hip hop hippo, a male, an adult figure, not necisarily dressed, kid friendly.

My initial Rudy sketches were my own design with very little input from the client. They needed an anthropomorphic saftey dog who loved donuts. These are a couple of the sketches I did. This is basically the first character I ever designed for a client. I used to draw stuff like this all the time in grade school, mostly aliens though.

Then with more guidance and sketches Rudy eventually evolved into this little guy. The clients were fairly specific about what they wanted but getting it right took tons of work.

Clara was a cartoon character but not quite as anthropomorphic as Rudy. She stay on all fours and talks to other animals. She does have a bit more facial expressions than a typical pug though.

This starfish actually took me a bit of time to develope as my original sketches were fairly stiff. Now he's one of the first things people comment on in the final images.

These are princesses from variouse lands of different times in history. It was a bit of a challenge for me to develope there costumes and facial features to make them easily recognizable as having a particular land of origin. They needed to be very distinct from one another and yet all have a sense of beauty about them.

And last are some seasonal characters I sketched for variouse projects. The witch was for a pumpkin carving design contest with "Pumkin Masters" which took second place in the faces category 2008. I don't typically draw characters that are meant to look evil. I have noticed in the past though that evil characters seem a lot easier to draw. I think it has to do with there imperfections. Sometimes when I draw children I have a hard time making there smiles look real. They often look angry. The Santa Clause is just a sketch I did for my sketch book. Maybe I'll develope him more next Christmas. I suppose I will probably go for more of a Saint Nicholas feel than a mere santa clause. The snowman was designed for a Christmas card. This character really humbled me because it was one of the first few I designed with no one elses ideas. I thought how hard could it be to draw a snowman? Really really hard. But for me it was mostly tough because I wanted to get an original feel. I also wanted him to have a spark of life to him. I tried variouse size snowballs, a pot for a hat, vest, variouse eyes, with and without ear muffs, etc. A detail as small as adding or leaving out eyebrows makes the biggest difference.

Graduate Pinball Painting Tutorial/process

2009-02-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

Today I finished an illustration that I worked on for a month. Overall it took 120hrs to get from initial thought process to the final painting found at the end of this post. Click on the images to see larger views. I made sure the last image/finished painting shows up large enough to see everything. The illustration was inspired by an ealier comic I drew below which won a competition.
Whenever I'm really stumped I tend to hang around until the ideas start flowing.

There are far too many sketches to post for all of the ideas and roughs to achieve this final sketch. Below is the final sketch with text laid in with photoshop.

From here I did a few variations on the overall value relations throughout the image. I basically printed off a couple pages of the image and tried different renditions. I chose this sketch and adjusted the contrast in photoshop to get it darker.

Then comes the color comps. Below are a few samples I did at about the size of a postage stamp. You can also see I tested the colors for the word "pinball" to see if I wanted the words lighter or darker than the background.

Next I tried a new technique I learned from combining the techniques of two amazing artists. From James Gurney I learned to protect the drawing on the canvas with spray fixitive which is later painted over with a thin coat of acrylic matte medium. This keeps the drawing from being pushed around by the oil paints and it gives a great surface for the oils. Next I laid in a transparent wash of paint in the complementary color of the finished painting. By nature oils are transparent, so the complementary color makes the finished painting pop even more. Dan Dos Santos does this but he paints in the lines of his underpainting rather than using pencil like I did.

Below is another new technique I tried. I premixed all the colors beforehand to ensure an overall color harmony throughout the painting. As you can see, I used blue as the dominant color with an overall cool color scheme. I also placed a midle value brown paper under a plexiglass pallete to help me see the values as I mixed paint.

The beginning brush strokes are laid in loose and playfull. I intermingled colors so the final result wouldn't be too flat. I learned this technique from Wendon Blake who does this when painting skies.

up to this point I only spent a couple of hours to mix the colors and lay down the background on the canvas.

I start to blend strokes of color and block in the focal area.

I leave the outer edges bare until the end so I have a place to lean my mahl stick. A tool I've never used before because I usually paint on smaller canvas than this. 24"x36"

A close up!

The finished illustration. I may do some more small tid bits and still have to sign it.

Illustration Process

2008-12-22T19:06:00.000-08:00

Today I finished another quick illustration for an online contest. This particular contest was a challenge for three main reasons. 1) I only had three partial days to design, create final sketch and then fully render final version. 2) I intended to use my new one month trial adobe illustrator and my new wacomb tablet to create the final vector art. I’ve never made a vector based illustration before, and I had only used adobe illustrator a couple of times to lay in some text on images, and I’ve only drawn with the wacomb tablet twice before. 3) The contest rules only allow for six colors including black and white and tints and tones of colors. I have never worked under color restrictions before and definitely not while working with a new medium. I gave myself this challenge because I need to learn the computer programs and I figure I may as well have a chance to win some income while practicing these new skills. You can see the finished version to the right. Please read on to see my process and thoughts as I designed and created this unique illustration. Then please go to http://www.greeneyed.com/contest_page.php?contest=1&entry=45 to vote on my design.
In brief. the contest is put on by a company called “Green Eyed Monster” and they are promoting a healthy environment. My task was to design a bag that would display this message visually and appeal to the common person.
Any good illustration has to start with lots of planning and sketching of ideas. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to let my thoughts simmer day after day until I had developed a brilliant stew. Instead I ended up relying heavily on my previous illustrations to fill in the gaps. As seen below, I started with very basic concept sketch for a green eyed monster. I actually was thinking about skipping the contest all together because I found out about it too late. While watching a commercial I thought of the idea to have a green monster with one eye and there would be a globe with the continents where his eyeball should be.

This then developed into sketch two, a quick sketch of the monster sitting on the earth picking at the garbage and eating it. Sort of like cats scratch at fleas.
Sketch three builds off an idea I used in a poster design for a masspirg earth day event. The idea here is that the monster is floating next to the earth and he is using a vacuum to suck up the garbage from the earth. At this point I decided to look up the phrase “green Eyed Monster” to see what sort of things might inspire my drawing. I use this technique when I start to run into walls with the sketches and need more reference. To my surprise I found this guy who was almost an exact replica of the monster I just designed. Yikes, back to the drawing board as they say.
I like to keep my old paintings hanging in my studio to keep me motivated and remind me what finished products look like. I looked up and noticed how my honey pot ant painting resembled the vacuum bag on the monsters back. This gave me the idea to create a monster that would mimic honey pot ants, only this monster would gobble up and store garbage in his abdomen instead of honey. The last few sketches show the development of that character. You will also notice I had another ant painting depicting a specid wasp and this inspired the idea to add wings to the creature.

Once the character was more or less designed I went ahead and worked out which continent layout felt best and moved the stream of garbage around a bit. I now have an elephant nose sucking the garbage up. This of course comes from another sketch I have hanging in my studio.

Now that I had the monster and his environment figured out I needed to figure out how to use Adobe illustrator to create vector art. I actually know the basic concept behind vector art because I took a digital illustration class three years ago. Unfortunately I ended up taking the digital illustration for animators class rather than the one for illustrators. So we spent the whole semester working with other programs and one day talking about illustrator. I basically spent a couple of hours trying to figure this out and realized I was trying to do the impossible in a short period of time. I ended up settling for an inked outline done in Adobe illustrator which I then brought into Photoshop where I did the color. Below you can see the difference between a magnified version of a vector (illustrator) drawing versus my original pencil drawing and pen drawing and the raster (Photoshop) image.Generally I will also do tons of color samples to determine the mood and overall feel of a piece. However I had pretty good idea of what I wanted for this image due to the theme and localized colors of objects. I wanted a green earth with black garbage, blue water, and a green monster. The yinyang pattern just sort of emerged from the sketches so I went with it. I also considered having an apple stem and leaves sticking out of the top of the earth but felt it was a bit much.
And now the final again.

More Digital Art

2008-12-06T11:55:00.000-08:00

I had the opportunity to put some final touches on another digital sketch today so I figured I would post it. This is now my second digital sketch with my new (and first) wacomb tablet. I spent about two hours on this which is a lot less time than it would probably take with oil paint. Of course I wouldn't consider this finished either. I chose this image of an elderly gentlemen to further my knowledge on the differences between youth and aged people. I found this guy to be a good match for my meager skills with digital art since the sketchy and sharp edges of the medium in its raw state actually add to his aged look. For children I would have to blend the colors and edges far more.

Drawing Children

2008-12-06T11:13:00.001-08:00

I don't know exactly when it happened but at some point in my days as an art student I decided I wanted to illustrate children's books. As strange as it may seem, it took me much longer to realize this would include drawing and painting children. Not only should these children look healthy, non scary, happy, loving, normal etc. but they should depict an age, an ethnicity, and flow rather than be stiff. Publishers often want to see illustrations of children in action. I had no idea how hard it would be to achieve this outcome when I first started but I enjoyed the challenge. I first realized how hard children are to depict in my Senior year portfolio class. I brought in a painting of some children playing in the snow and a few people pointed out that the children looked stiff and even a bit retarded. I've often heard it said that an artist is there own worst critic. As an artist I tend to criticize my art so drastically that I don’t want people to see it until I’m happy with it. There have been times I worked on an image for hours and think it looks fine while someone else will come in and immediately spot problem areas. This happens when I look at individual parts of an illustration but don’t take the time to step back and look at the work as a whole. One good technique to help see problem areas is to either turn the drawing upside down or look at it in a mirror.
Over the past couple of months I have tackled what I feel is the most crucial element of any children’s illustrators portfolio, the children. I worked a bit on drawing children and plan to continue this process until I feel confident drawing children in any pose, and ethnicity, any age, gender, perspective etc. without reference. I will be happy to receive any advice or techniques that people have discovered in there own art making process. Some samples on the right.
These are all under one hour sketches and they are freehand drawings from photos. Click on the image to enlarge.

Just a few quick things I’ve learned to keep in mind. The younger the child, the rounder the face. Children have bigger eyes, ears and mouth in comparison to size of face than adults. Children have bigger foreheads. Children’s heads are bigger in proportion to their bodies than adults, often having four to five heads height while adults are seven to eight heads tall. Their eyebrows and hair tends to be very light and thin, particularly on young children. The line under children’s eyes tends to be less pronounced. Teenagers tend to have longer faces with more chiseled features, not so round. Younger children have short necks.

Matty goes Digital!

2008-11-24T09:08:00.000-08:00

Many of you who know me and my art making process know that I'm not very interested in making digital art. However I have seen a huge surge in this form of art in the last few years and realize it's importance in today's illustration marketplace. In recognition of the benefits and necessity of digital art, I have decided to give it a shot. The skull to the right is my very first quick sketch done with a wacom tablet in adobe photoshop. It's just an attempt to get a feel for using the tablet. I plan to work with the tablet until I get as confident with it as I am with a pencil. This will enable me to work faster and cheaper and hopefully broaden my field of employment. I've been playing around with google sketchup, Inkscape and have worked with adobe photohsop for about four years now. I plan to study some tutorials on adobe illustrator, indesign and other common programs used in the illustration field. Many job listings don't even want to see traditional art unless the artist is also capable of working with these common programs.