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.

Children's Book Character Designs

         Part of the fun of each new book is designing characters but its also extremely time consuming and can be hard to really develop each character as much as one would like. Doing a book series enables me to delve in a bit deeper with each new book to develop the characters a bit further than the first book.

         For the second book in the silas series we get to find out what this energetic granny wears to work, or what does she wear on a  fun day with the grandkids? The book also introduces some new characters. Below I've posted some of my color samples and the final chosen samples.
The first book in the series is available for purchase at www.thesilasseries.com

 

Maple Tree Watercolor Painting Kirby Vermont

   This past weekend I finally had the opportunity to get my watercolors out for my first ala prima landscape painting of the season! I have to give credit for the inspiration and idea for this piece to my wife.

 I'll likely eventually post this for sale on my etsy store but for now I'm going to get a few more paintings done first so i can photograph them and post them all at the same time. I currently have seventeen items posted to my etsy store, various landscape originals and prints.

 https://www.etsy.com/shop/matthewgauvin?ref=si_shop

A little bit of the process work.

Charicature Portraits

As I mentioned in my previous post, I've recently taken on a variety of portrait work. The previous one was a HUGe  four foot by three foot imaginative family portrait done in oils with tons of details and more realistic features than caricature but by no means photo realistic. The One I want to show today leans much more in the direction of caricature but certainly not fully as I didn't go out of my way to exaggerate features other than the size of the head and some minor facial expressions and hair shape.

I took some video of me painting this image while discussing things as I go along. Unfortunately I probably won't have time to edit and post that until the new year. I began the image with drawings of the heads which I got approved by the client, then drew the bodies on separate paper and combined the two in photoshop playing with head size. then went into color samples and in particular for this image focused on how I was intending to paint the snow. 

 The drawing taped to a movable board that can be lifted and rotated if needed. The tape keeps the paper from buckling while also leaving us a clean white edge at the end. For this image I traced the final drawing to the watercolor paper with a light table but often I find that you can print the final onto final paper in a fraction of the time. The trouble of course is you have to use a thinner paper than may be desirable and even then will often have a hard time with the printer not being able to feed the paper correctly. For the printer method I find the heaviest paper that works is 140 lb and you have to make sure you have the grain of the paper feeding through the printer horizontally so that you can gently roll the paper prior to printing.

 Before painting the sky I masked out the foreground elements with winsor newton masking and used a supernib masking fluid for tiny details. Then I mixed a decent size batch of the sky color, pre-wet the paper with clean water using a spray bottle and  a large brush to go fast. I let the water dry for a bit then went in with a second coat just before applying large, fast,,horizontal strokes of paint which are more saturated at the top and less towards the horizon. For these large flakes I needed to work fast and get the salt into the paint before it dried to much. gently sprinkling salt onto the wet paint creates this great texture that looks unbelievably like falling snow flakes. For smaller flakes wait a bit more time before using the salt.

 Then let the sky dry. You can use a hairdryer to speed this up. Then peel off the masking fluid and apply some loose color ot the foreground. For a little texture int eh foreground snow I sprinkled some drops of water before the paint dries. Before peeling the masking off I generally use a wet brush and paper towel to get rid of any excess paint so that won't be smudged onto the clean white paper underneath.

 I build the faces up slowly with layers of paint. The precise method for this will depend on if you want hard edges shading on the face or softer. For hard edge, let each layers dry before applying another, for soft edge you'll need all your paint colors premixed so you can quickly lay one color into another int eh limited window you have. This takes much more practice to learnt eh exact time to lay int eh secondary and additional shading.

 generally for faces in watercolor I lay in all of the skin tones first and then hair building up in layers before finishing with the eyes, mouth, lips and such. This keeps darker paint from leaking into the skin tones.

 Unfortunately I was feeling the crunch of time so had to stop taking photo reference at this point. basically I continued to lay int eh facial features and hair in layers then painted the clothing and skis. Then for finishing touches Pulled out a bit of color around the skies to indicate misty snow, then used some gauche splattered on the paint legs to indicate small snow. Lastly I used  slightly wet brush to pull some of the colors off the figures behind them to indicate movement.The final scan is at the top of this post.

Vermont Oil Landscape Paintings: 2

Back in April of 2011 I posted a bunch of oil landscape paintings I did over the past few years. I've since sold most of those paintings but haven't had time to make more until now. I've been working on tons of small watercolor landscapes and this past Saturday I painted the first oil landscape that I've done in over a year. I decided to document the process a bit.

posts of my watercolor landscapes. first few  , shows my pocharde box for plein air watercolor painting

This first image shows the final painting. Oil on 5"x6" wooden panel. I actually already painted this same scene twice in watercolor but have changed things with each image. the first one has  a house int he background with hay bails in the field on the right and the corn had just begun to grow. The second image put a differetn house int he image and has corn growing more but focusus more ont eh patern of the various fields. Then for this image I intended to focus primarily ont eh foreground corn. Unfortunately I ran low on time and ended up rushign the corm more than intended.

This next image shows the various items I bring with me when painting with oil in plein air. Some of these things are the same as used for my watercolor supplies. 1) fishing or picnic basket with hinge top. 2) orderless Mineral Spirits in a  pickle jar to clean the brushes. 3) oil paint tubes. I tied to limit my pallet to make color choices much faster and for an easier accomplished color harmony. Basically I have a warm and cool yellow, blue and red with white and a purple. 4) refined linseed oil for thinning the paint. 5) duct tape to hold things down. 6) a small folding canvas chair with a cold pouch built in under the seat. 7) This is a book I bring out into the field with me from time to time as I'm still learning how to get better and faster with my landscapes. "Oil Painter's Solution Book : Landscapes: Over 100 Answers to Your Oil Painting Questions" by Elizabeth Tolley. 8) A durable metal easel the adjusts up taller and shorter with tilting bar which accepts various size canvases. 9) A hand sewn brush pouch my sister made for me. It has various width slots to slide the brush handles into and has a flap that folds over the top of the brushes, then I roll it up to keep all of the bristles in shape during transport. In this pic I have folded the corners around the easel legs and clipped the corners of the brush pouch cloth in the back. 10) a mixture of OMS and linseed oil in a small glass jar with a  tight lid for thinning paints. As I build up the layers I use less OMS and more linseed oil for thicker layers of paint that will take slightly longer to dry. Doing the reverse may lead to cracking paint. 11) this is the same wooden box I use for my watercolors. It has a hinging lid and various compartments in the bottom half. 12) paint rag. 13) wooden panel with gessoed surface. 14) my wooden paint pallet that I've had since college.

below is a pic showing the painting in process. 1) is a tiny quick thumbnail value study to help me remember the original value structure as the light changes a lot over the course of a few hours. 2) I put some duct tape from the top lid of the box to the bottom lid to keep it at a 90 degree angle.  3) I have a small piece of duct tape holding the panel to the wooden box lid. The wooden box is clamped onto the easel between the two clips made for holding canvas. You can see my pallet in the foreground with dabs of paint laid out. I generally hold it in my left hand or rest it on my lap.

Below is a series of pics I took during the painting process. The first step involves laying in basic value structure . This is very thinned down paint and generally helps the next layers of paint go down much faster. Sometimes I do the under painting with a warm raw sienna or ochre as I've read about many times but this time I decided to try something I read in Tolley's book which shows her painting the background values with a cooler under painting and the foreground with warmer tones.  Doing this step also helps me to keep value in mind as I paint the various pieces of landscape. From reading Brad Teare's blog I learned a lot about keeping track of values from one mass to the next. Typically the sky will be the lightest value in the whole image, the ground or things on the horizontal plane facing the sky tend to be the next lightest while vertical things like trees and buildings have the darkest areas with the absolute darkest darks typically in the foreground. Typically i leave the sky white at this stage to allow more vibrancy to show through the sky. The darkest darks and highlights are saved for last

In this second image I have laid in the three or four main colors I mixed for the sky. I make a dark blue, light blue, a light yellow and light crimson. I start with dabs of each color, more blue and darker dabs towards the top and more of the warmer and lighter dabs towards the bottom of the sky. In step three I lightly blends the dabs of color together being sure to keep leave some of the colors showing rather than ruthlessly blend them. I learned this technique from a book by Wendon Blake called " The complete Painting Course" 

The sky colors blended with a soft bristle brush. I use a flat brush but they say a filbert is best. I've never found a filbert that doesn't leave marks. Guess I haven't spent a enough money on them.

I've laid in a purplish undertone for the ridgeline trees then put a light blueish green for the highlights and tried to vary the colors slightly and focused on having an interesting ridgeline. I later went back in and put sky holes in the trees. Sky holes is when you can see sky through the foliage of the trees. I first learned about this from my highschool art teacher Larry Golden and have since learned it from James gurney, Wendon Blake, Brad teare and others. When I was first learning to paint with acrylics I used to paint the whole sky first and paint the tree and leaves on top but this method of painting the sky holes on top of the foliage I find to leave much more pleasant results. I'll probably write a whole blog post about it at some point.

Now I worked in the middle ground trees and continue with the foreground field trying to keep variation of color amongst the trees and have them slightly darker than the background while the foreground field was in fact slightly lighter than the background field. The final image shows the corn painted in. ( the first image show in this post.).

Pocharde Box for Plein Air Watercolor Painting

It's been a while since my last post as I realized this post will be my one hundreth POST!!!! I found it to be a bit intimidating to approach this post as I didn't want to just keep posting recent art. I've been wanting to find the time to post informational and interesting posts. There is sooo much I have learned over the years to make my process faster, easier, and just with making art in general that I would like to share with others. Unfortunately those kinds of posts take a lot more preparation and effort. One day I suppose I will get to some of my ideas for those.
     For today I decided to show a bit of behind the scenes for my materials I take with me when doing plein air watercolor paintings. In the past I've done alla prima oil paintings which would be a completely different, heavier more complex set up than this. At some point I will likely do a post on that process. When painting in oil I plan on taking the whole day to hike out into a field and stay set up for atleast a few hours. The light changes a lot over that time, so sometimes I end up going back a few times if needed.

Above is a picture of all my supplies in the general setup I use while painting. In this case I was sitting on the ground so I used my larger wicker paint box which I believe was a fishing basket I picked up cheap at a yardsale.

Generally I paint while sitting on a  tree stump, rock, or chair etc. in which case I tend to use the smaller paint box (#2) which sits on my lap. 3) sometimes I tape the paper to the back of a watercolor paper pad which can be proped up inside the wicker basket. Other times I tape the paper to the upper inside cover of the #2 box. 4) I generally bring extra water so I can have clean paint water whenever needed. 5) Is a small set of watercolors which has four little mixing areas in the lid and a convenient thumb bracket on the base. 6) I generally bring my camera as most of the watercolors I do are with the intention of possibly turning them into larger oil paintings later in the studio. Taking pics will help me to get extra information that may be needed for that process. 7) masking tape holds the paper down so it doesn't curl or buckle while painting. 8) a pencil sharpener. 9) pencil to sketch out the image before starting to paint. 10) I find that those little chicken bullion cube containers work great for holding the paint water and the lid seems to be water tight from my experience. 11) a variety of brushes and scrap paper to test colors.  I forgot to number the additional paint pallet I sometimes bring with me, shown in the pic. I also generally bring sunglasses which help me to see values easier. It's also to have a viewfinder cut into a pice of card stock which helps to frame the image. Lastly you'lle need paper towels to clean bushes in between colors.

The resulting painting for this particular outing is shown above. For me the interesting elements to this scene were the lines and shape of the landscape. I also tried to capture the warmth of the morning sun. As I was painting, a woman was walking her dog and stopped by for a short chat with my fiance and her dog. She saw me painting and it wasn't until she left that I found out she was the owner of this particular house.

A few more watercolors I've done over the past couple of weeks. I do enjoy doing these, but I also find this medium to be a bit frustrating at times as some things just need more time to do properly with watercolor.These same paintings with oil would have been probably four times longer to do though.

Pigs under the post office:one

Over the past month I've enjoyed finally putting in some quality time with my new children's book " Pigs Under the Post office". We've designed characters and narrowed down to the final thumbnails and I'm hoping to have the final drawings done by the end of the week.

 I did a bunch of thumbnail sketches for each  page of the book then the client and I chose the ones laid out below.

BBQ LOGO 3: Vector Art

BBQ LOGO 1: Clients original Logo and my initial rough concept sketches
BBQ LOGO 2: Refined pencil sketch and discussion of tangent points

  Over the past month or so I've brought  a few projects to completion and dug in deep with a couple of more recent projects. This BBQ logo design was started months ago so i was quit happy to finally bring it to completion.

                                                    First I did a finalized ink link drawing.

Then I did the final digital art. We originally wanted to use either watercolor or oil paint for the final but the client eventually decided they wanted to have the logo blown up large enough to go on the side of their concession truck. SO at that point I made the leap to digital art and discovered a way to vectorize the final art. More on that below. I did a few samples for the t-shirt design but mostly focused on the business card design as my starting point that would lead into the other product designs.

The business card design process involved many steps. It would take too much room to show all the process but I have a sampling below. Basically I did font samples, background color samples, layout samples. The client liked a cropped version on a  black background so i then refined that further with a few more ideas involving a gradient background color.

So to this point I had designed, business cards, t-shirts and product labels. Now I needed to take this art produced at a fairly small size and enlarge it to a really huge size without losing any of the quality. Typically an artist would create the original art in adobe illustrator as vector art but I didn't have the option available to me as I generally work in traditional mediums. So for this I turned to an online program called "vector magic". In my initial tests I immediately noticed the vector traced sample was horrible quality. The below image on left shows my original digital rough sample I did with shading. On the right is the vector file which shows harsh lines and shapes on the shaded areas instead of smooth transitions.

So I determined the best way to end up with a good vector was to do the original digital art with flat colors. This in the end  feel also lead to a better logo overall anyway as it simplified all of the forms and colors to the basics.

For those unfamiliar with vector files. Basically typical images are in pixel based formats which use small dots/pixels to display the image. Vector uses mathematical equations in the form of shapes of color to display images. So vector files are easily scalable without losing any of the quality. This logo as a vector file can now be enlarged as much as the client wants and it will keep its sharp lines. Pixel based images get blurry as they are enlarged.

Teen Chapter Book Cover Design: Seven

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" book Illustrations in Progress

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.

Teen Chapter Book Cover Design: Five

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!
 

Teen Chapter Book Cover Design: Four

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.