Little Ducky!

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

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

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

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!