Vermoosin' Hard Cider!!!!

Vermonters will probably remember last year when The Vermont based company "Woodchuck Hard Cider" was in a dispute with the "WoodChuck Coffee Roasters" Company over their name and Logo.

http://www.schwimmerlegal.com/2013/05/woodchuck-cider-v-woodchuck-coffee.html

Well that dispute worked out to my favor in a LARGE way as I'm now happy to present their new labeling and Identy will be branded around Barbs and My "Vermoosin" Concept!  They are calling it "Whacky Antler Hard Cider" and will be working with me to create a whole line of Kirby the Moose Illustrations to fit each of their products. Below is a mock up they sent of their "Amber" product.  Not only will I be getting a whole lot of free hard Cider but I managed to work out a really amazing advance and royalty with them!!!!  Here's a link to  my original Vermoosin' products on zazzle for those interested in purchasing them.   http://www.zazzle.com/sneezingleopard* 

EDIT:   Sorry to have to report this is actually just a bad April Fool's Joke. I posted it to FB as well and I started to feel pretty bad when everyone was showing such kind support. I have to say I even surprised myself when I dropped that moose into place in photoshop and saw how cool he looked. Maybe I should contact "Woodchuck" and see if they have plans to launch another line of products anytime soon!

New Cover Design

The second book in the Silas series is well underway with all of the 19 rough internal drawings done! In this book Granny snow finds a friend for Silas and brings her home. I really enjoyed designing the cover of the book as I don't often get the opportunity to spend a good deal of time designing a building or house. This house was initially inspired by a house in Lyndonville VT but further inspired by various reference pictures I have.

      About a year ago I learned a trick from James Gurney's blog that has helped me immensely in how I approach children's book illustration. I don't have time to fully explain it but basically to give everything a more cartoony look and feel he suggested simplifying the forms and making objects bigger and wider than they would be in real life.  He showed some pictures from animated background designs that demonstrated the point. One I remember in particular was from "Snowwhite and the seven dwarfs" which showed the inside of the dwarfs house as having short stubby stools, wide thick window sills, large wooden beams on the ceiling etc. I always have this principle in the back of my mind these days and try to work it into play whenever possible. I've also received some inspiration from watching tree house masters on tv in which they incorporate all kinds of fun shapes and proportions into their designs.

New logo and Children's Book

Work is well underway for the second book in the Silas series " Silas Gets a Sister". We've gone through character designs, Thumbnails sketches and are almost done the rough drawings headed into final drawings and color samples in the next few weeks.  Here's a  couple of my favorite scenes so far from the book. The first book is available at www.thesilasseries.com

   I also recently Accepted a second logo design for an order of priests known as the Redemptorist. The log is for a youth conference they have coming up in New York. We started with a rough sample they sent and tried various alterations and into rough color samples. I designed it to work as a solid design on t-shirt and then as a full color vector version for large banners.

Here's the first design I did a few years back.

Cobblestone Three and book fifteen!!!!

I've been super busy these past few months working on my recent book "Big ol' Striped Silas" which I've figured is now my fifteenth book!!!! Sooo hard to believe. This past month I had the opportunity to work on my third assignment for Cobblestone Magazine. Here are some final art from both projects.

Cobblestone: Civil Rights Leaders you should Know. Bond, Jemison, Murray, Steele

 

Silas:

 

Entangled - IF

This weeks Illustration Friday word is "Entangled". This is a word I'm very familiar with lately as I've taken on a part time job to go with my full time illustration work and have found myself all wound up in various kinds of work.

    For my illustration work I recently moved the digital half of my studio to a part of the house with more foot traffic. Due to limited space in this new area I have my flat screen monitor hung on the wall and a swivel office chair that swivels between digital illustration mode and watching tv mode. The longer I stay in this environment the wires for headphones, wacom tablet, monitors, scanners and printers have multiplied and it has become more difficult to swivel without getting all tangled up.

   For my part time job I'm detailing cars and equally i find myself tangled in the water hose and the vacuum cord and hose while I try to wedge all 6'2" of me into a chevy impala one minute and into a cobalt the next. I can envision either of these situations making great illustrations and wish i had time to sketch them out.

     What i do already have sketched out though is a fellow who works as a veterinarian who finds himself all tangled in his work. This first sketch is the first round drawing for the vet in the book " The Little Boy With  No Name and No Birthday".

While I loved the technical aspects of the drawing and spent lots of time getting the folds and anatomy looking good, Ultimately I had to opt for a friendlier and more playful drawing.

The final art below.

Free Vermoosin' Coloring Pages and an Introduction

For the coloring pages go to the end of this post.

      I was looking through the last few blog posts I did and realized I haven't really posted any of the illustrations from my new line of Vermoosin' Products yet. I've also been wanting to post some more free coloring pages for kids and since this bunch of illustrations belong entirely to me and I have good line drawings of them, I have the freedom to do that!

    So far I only have  a handful of illustrations as I rarely have time to work on my own projects. I have big ideas in my mind and am still considering doing a couple of different styles to see if maybe the full line is done in another medium or style than this. Actually the moose on the bottom right was done in watercolor as it was originally a design i made up for my wife for valentines day.  I worked in digital for the rest as I started out thinking of doing screen printed T's and needed to have a limited color pallet, but that route didn't work out and so for now I kept things simple using zazzle as my printer.  www.zazzle.com/sneezingleopard*

    The illustrations I have so far.

         I'm hoping to eventually kickstart this project so I can actually give it the time and money it deserves. The moose's name is Kirby (my wife's home town) and I've begun to develop an entire back story to his existence which one day may make it into a children's book. He's a young energetic Vermont moose who pretty much enjoys any Vermont sport you can imagine (hiking, yaking, bowling, fishing, biking etc.) and of course his favorite drink is Vermont maple syrup which gives him all the energy he'll ever need for his wacky endeavours! I'm sure I'll reveal more of his story as time goes on but that's the basics.

some of the products you can find on my Vermoosin' store www.zazzle.com/sneezingleopard*

        Now for a few free coloring pages for kids to print out and use their own style to color in. These line art drawings were done with fine tip markers and then vectorized with inkscape to create clean crisp bold lines. Feel free to print out as many copies as you would like for students, doctors office, or your own kids. I would also love to see what they come up with so please send me a copy of their finished art to matthew.gauvin@gmail.com . If I get a handful of submissions or more I would be happy to show them on my blog with your permission. Enjoy!

Frogzilla Digital Illustration Final

After a lot of reading and a few tutorials and some road blocks i finally have my first ever full page digital illustration about 95% done!!!  It took about twenty hours but most of that was just the learning curve and trying to be extra careful so I wouldn't accidentally lose lots of progress. I'm REALLY loving how quick and simple it is to make changes to color and or value. I'm hoping having digital under my belt will make my art more appealing to publishers as i plan to begin a  more vigorous marketing campaign.

I've come a loooong way since my very first digital sketch five years ago.

Pigs Making a Splash!

I was happy to find out that this past weekend my newest book "Pigs! Under the Post office?"  was in the Burlington Free Press Newspaper. I was really surprised when I saw not only a couple of the illustrations included but they are actually in color! That's a first for me and already lead to one person who contacted me about my art.

The book is off to a good start so far as we did the WCAX interview a little while back and are looking onto book reading event options. It also already has three favorable reviews online which is hard to achieve in self published children's books. This book means a lot to me as it is a culmination of many of the things I strive to learn and apply in my art over the years. it has the whimsy, the bright color, the characters with differing expressions and movement and an overall fun backdrop.

First Full Page Digital Illustration

I spent the first half of the day doing my last bits of research and study on digital illustration and then finally dove in head first for the second half of the day!  I'm soooo happy with the results so far! This is my first ever  digital full page illustration. It took me over an hour just to figure out how to get the clouds painted over the blue gradient sky among a few other struggles but I can already tell how much faster this medium will be once I get things down pact. I also discovered all sorts of great keyboard commands that save an immense amount of time and will help me in my typical photoshop work. So much faster pressing a button to make brushes smaller rather than having to click the pull down menu. I'm also really enjoying the process of acquiring textures and figuring out which ones work best in the various parts of the illustration. My progress so far shown below.

FROGZILLA!!!! and other stories

Recently I've been working on one book project that has four stories within the book. Rather than illustrating every single page of the story we've decided to give each story one full page illustration and one spot illustration. I've come to believe this is going to make for  a much better book than most of my typical children's books as we have plenty of room for the text and plenty of room for the illustrations. I get to take the main action of the story and make two illustrations rather than trying to make twenty plus illustrations for each story which can sometimes result in a  lot of watered down illustrations. It also allows me to spend a bit more time with each illustration than I might normally be able to. Rather than trying to draw each character twenty times in different poses I can focus on each pose and facial expression until i feel it's right.

I've even found myself doing LOTS more ambitious spot illustrations than I would typically undertake. In the end I'm feeling that lots of things are coming together on this project that will allow me to produce my best work BY FAR to date. That's somewhat ironic as each new week presents challenges and i never really seem to know how much longer I'll be able to keep at this full time. Yet I've wondered about that basically since I started illustrating full time over six years ago! 

Illustrated Valentine's Day Card

Recently I've been working on the third book in the "Samantha Series" , "Samantha Plays Possum" which I will share a bit on soon. As that is currently my only official project I currently have going I've been doing tons of background work on my online stores and getting new things set up for selling my work. One such project involves a new moose character I'm designing. This is probably the first character I've ever been in full charge of designing without input from a client or friends (so far). I'll probably ask for folks advice at some point but for now I'm working a bit in secret until the project is ready to reveal in full. The first test product i've created is a valentine's Day card available on my zazzle store. http://www.zazzle.com/moose_valentines_day_card-137201477789749408

PIGS!!! Cover Design

I've been somewhat silent about my  "PIGS! , Under the Post Office?" book lately as the project underwent a change of plans and I took a bit of time off from it to work on other projects for a bit. We are now back on track with that book and still hoping to be published within a couple of months. All of the internal illustrations are done but I do have one more internal to repaint due to a lack of planning on my part with that image. It simply wasn't going to work to have text overlaid on it as it was and it came out terrible being the first image I painted in the book. I struggled a lot with how precisely to paint the mud for this book and didn't do as many preliminary color samples for that as I should have. Other than that I just have the cover design which we are working out final details for.

we will still play with background layout colors once the main design is chosen. This particular cover design is basically a combination of two of the internal illustrations so for the samples I just photo-shopped those two illustrations together rather than doing actual sloppy color samples. These could actually serve as the final cover designs but as I tend to get super picky with my art I will actually go ahead and paint out one final image. I have some changes that need to be made to specifically fit the images to the cover. The title is just a rough lay in for now and will be laid out by our graphic designer. As usual I plop in the cover with "Hobo STD" and hope the graphic designer comes up with better more pleasing ideas. As I always tell people, I'm not a graphic designer but doing this step does help the client to imagine the final design.

   I'm getting pretty excited about this book as I really like the story and feel the client has some new fresh ideas to promote and market the book. I also feel the book is somewhat timely as we are at a point in our country where post offices may be going extinct with the advance of e-mail, texting, and online communication in general.

Dog Portrait, Characature, Landscapes etc.

These past few months have taken my art in unexpected directions as I venture into areas I hadn't given much consideration to previously.  I'm currently working on a new family portrait image which I don't yet have samples of. It's another one of my "imaginative Portraits" that I began doing a few years back. The difference with this one being that it focuses more heavily on the portrait aspect than the previous two images did.

    I also recently agreed to do a straight forward family portrait for a friend of my fiance. This came about as a result of him having seen the wedding invitations I illustrated for my upcoming wedding. I don't think I've ever done caricatures before either but for some reason this seemed like the natural thing to do for my wedding invitations. Not sure how that happened but they were tons of fun to illustrate and everyone is saying they love them!

I have also been putting a lot of work into making a portfolio of landscape paintings for the East Burke Fall Foliage Festival coming up on Sept. 29th in East Burke, VT. I've done landscapes in the past but never to the extent that I'm currently doing. I'm hoping to write a blog post this week displaying many of the images I painted for that. I'll have postcards and prints as well as the original art for sale.

Just today I finished painting a quick pet portrait I did as a reward for a kickstarter campaign for one of my books.

I've also been talking with a friend about doing a hand painted sign for his business. You might think that all of this is a result of not being able to find my typical children's book work. Actually I haven't really had an issue with that yet. I think it has more to do with just needing a bit of a break from those longer projects. All of these other avenues have been making me ask the question though. Should I in fact offer some of these other forms of art as a service? or should I stay focused in one area of art and try to perfect my skills therein? I don't know if it would make sense for me to have a children's book project going in one corner, pet portraits in one, landscapes in another and hand painted signs in yet another. In fact I know that would be a disaster and not good for my sanity as I currently have the messiest studio of all time and have nine folders for different clients on my desktop. I welcome any advice or comments from other artists who may have experience with these sorts of things in their own practice. I do have a feeling I'll keep doing some of these random projects on the side but will probably keep with the children's art as my main thing.

Thankfull for All of My Clients

Sooo excited to receive ten copies of "Samantha Loses the Box Turtle" in the mail today! It's been available for digtal e-readers for about a year now but I had always hoped it would one day make it to the printed page. Thanks to our successful kickstarter campaign this book is now available in print. The picture below shows the books spread out with one of them opened up to one of the internal illustrations, there are a couple of bookmarks and some amazing stickers as well that the author sent to me !!! Sooo Awesome! In the upper part of the photo are a couple of the near finish illustrations for the children's book I'm currently working on " Pigs Under The Post Office" .

I was pleasantly surprised to turn one of the shipping boxes over and find this great little message. It's a stick figure drawing of Samantha and says " what Samantha would look like without you" .  

I'm sooo blessed to work with such amazing clients who value what I do enough to hire me and who care enough to go that extra step. I've had a client who published my process work into a book just so I could show future clients my process and how much work goes into each project. I have a client who has gone the extra mile to publish his own books and continues to help me publish books for my other clients and who did book readings, fall festivals and even did some plein air painting with me and set up a number of other successfull book projects for me with new clients. I've had clients who send along bonus payments when they get the final art, love it and realize how many hours it actually took to complete the way they wanted it. I've had a client who got me my own studio for free at an old convent, paid for an apartment for me for a few months to finish their book (on top of regular payment for the illustrations), took me out on his boat to go fishing in Boston, brought me home cooked meals in the studio, invited me to use their pool any time I wanted, moved me back to Vermont from Boston with a company truck etc. I've had repeat clients who keep me in business. I had a client who liked to call every now and then just to talk about faith and life as friends. My clients have sent me copies of our books, send me amazing encouraging e-mails when I'm feeling stressed, they are respectful to me and generous.

      I try my best to be professional but at times it's difficult working for soo many different people over the course of the years and it can be overwhelming when I promise to have things done by a certain time and then take on too much other work to follow through. My clients are patient and understanding. I have no idea where I would be without them!!!

         So getting these books from Daisy and this fantastic little drawing and note just hit a chord with me. It made me realize that too often I focus on the few clients who never seem to make their payments on time, or who pull out of a project without paying for the work already done or who just keep wanting more and more without offering more pay. It made me realize I would rather just focus on the great clients who follow through on their end of things. They may feel like they can't do the illustrations without me but I know for sure I can't do these illustrations without them!! I'm particularly thankful for those clients like Daisy who have experience with teaching kids and who devote their lives to loving on kids. These are the clients who write great stories that kids will love and that will teach kids. In the end that's the real reason I'm in this business. Sure a large part of it is that I'm still just a kid at heart and I love to be able to bring that out in my illustrations but I could paint all day and not feel fullfilled unless it were for the books being published and making into the hands of kids.

One Week With an Illustrator in The Studio

   This week is one of those rare weeks where I get to feel the joy of finishing off a few projects and packaging them up to send out to clients. Sooooo Happy!!! Most of my projects stretch on for months on end so whenever I finish a project it is a mixture of relief, excitement, exhaustion, and paranoia that they will come back for yet another revision on something.  It's often like building a skyscraper with an indeterminate number of floors.

   I began the week with some more color and border samples for "Pigs Under the Post Office"

Continued with some e-mail correspondence with a repeat client with whom I will be starting another imaginative family portrait.  I posted images to my artwanted.com portfolio, filled out my application for the East Burke Fall Folliage Festival, read art blogs, listened to art related podcasts, and talked to the graphic designer for my "A Cloudy Day " book. That book is finally going to print!!!!

I then found out that a book I illustrated the cover for in 2010 has finally been published! So I sent a congratulatory postcard along to that client.

 I was finally able to make some time to do the absolute final revisions for the Bull Illustrations. I also got to use my "new" printers full 13"x19" printing capabilities for the first time : )  $82 for the ink and photo paper!

Then I had half a day to work on the final line drawing for my wedding invitations I'm doing the illustrations for. As much as I would like to show the progress for that, I really want to keep it a surprise for now but will definitely unveil that eventually.

The second half of the day I took the time to do an original watercolor painting of the turtle from "Samantha Loses the Box Turtle" which is a commissioned reward for the kickstarter campaign. Complete with a certificate of authenticity and free postcard samples of my art to go along with all of the other cool prizes they received from the author.

I started this week on a  high from having finished the final art for "Samantha hatches the Chicken Egg". One of the full page illustrations below.

Today and tomorrow I will be finishing off the week by mailing/delivering the art, writing this blog post, probably updating my website and blog with my two new books available, "Samantha Loses the Box Turtle" paperback version and" "Hello Jesus, it's Jeanne... Again". Then I will transfer the final drawings for my pig book onto the final painting surface to prepare for a full week of painting next week!

Samantha Cover : book Two : Part Three

part one : thumbnails and rough sketches
part two : Layout color choices

I'm pretty sure I finished the cover for the second book in the samantha series today. Just in time to announce the kickstarter campaign for the first book. The goal is to be able to raise $500 to use towards costs associated with printing and promotion of "Samantha loses The Box Turtle" as a paperback book. It's currently only available as an e-reader and has done quit well with some requests for hard copies of the books. Check out the kickstarter campaign page to learn more! 16 days to go!http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2016518480/samantha-loses-the-box-turtle

    The cool thing about supporting the printing of this book through the kickstarter campaign is that no matter how little you donate, you will get goodies in return. At different donation levels you get prizes ranging from copies of the e-book, copies of the paperback book, stickers, an original piece of art by me!, or you can even have yourself or your kid written into the third book in the series!  In many cases you would really just be donating the amount that it would typically cost to buy the book or e-book anyway.

                          

 The sample below was my first draft of the cover on a grey scale layout. The author and I agreed that the background cupboards were too dark and her face was painted a bit too differently than the first book. So I adjusted those elements with guache as well as a few other tiny details.

 Below I've posted the cover of the first book in the series. Which is currently available as an e-reader on Amazon.com and elsewhere. You can click ont he link on the left of this blog to buy the book on amazon.

Samanth Cover Design: Book Two

Part one cover design process for first book in this series
Part two for cover design process of first book in this series

        Today I finished off the rough draft of the final cover art for the second book in the "Samantha" Series authored by Daisy Griffin.

As the book cover is the most important illustration in the whole book I tend to start with as many thumbnail sketches as I can come up within a reasonable amount of time. Usually I shoot for ten or more. In this case we had a rough idea of the layout we wanted as we would keep in line with the first book in the series.

This was a hard cover to narrow down as I liked number twelve showing the glowing light coming from inside the incubator, most people polled seemed to like number nine which I also liked, we then started with number eight which the author liked. Really I would have been happy with about half of these concepts.

At this point the author didn't like seeing the eggs and a hatched chic in the same image and preferred number six. So I did a rough from that thumbnail.

from here the author made More suggestions and we went into a more finished sketch.

Then color samples and into the final art seen at the top of this post.