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.

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

 

Wine and Art Snowcase

   I don't get a chance to do a lot in terms of meeting the public with my art much these days so when I do it's all the better.  This past weekend I was at a local show with my landscapes and decided to bring some of my books along as well. As usual with these events, I didn't make a bunch of sales but I did meet a couple of people who may hire me for small gigs down the road. I also had the opportunity to talk with many of the other artists and got some great tips and advice. In particular I was happy that I'm finally starting to figure out a setup that isn't extremely hard to put together and looks pretty good compared to past events.

New Books Available now

           In the new year I received my copies of the cobblestone magazine I illustrated this past year, along with the two new books recently published, "Big Ole Striped Silas" and "Brave Roger, Little Mumps and Me". I'm extremely happy with all of the products but particularly pleasantly surprised and happy with both of the books. Both are my first on glossy paper and make all the difference in the world. The Silas book is available for purchase on www.thesilasseries.com  and the "brave Roger . . ." book is only available on my personal website in a few days. www.matthewgauvin.com

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.

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.

Finally Going Digital!!!! . . . maybe?

Well, I've put it off long enough. I finally convinced one of my clients to let me go digital! I've committed to doing one full page illustration from my new book as a finished digital painting. Yesterday i finished up some color samples for a few of the full pagers. They are messy and the colors aren't really exactly what I want but they serve their purpose. 

If the first digital illustration doesn't come out as amazing as I'm imagining in my head I will likely end up doing the whole book in watercolor like my last six books. I feel like I have a lot riding on this. Hoping for the best!

In the past I've done various pieces of digital art but always stuff without backgrounds and without any sort of textures. This will be  a whole new experience for me as I plan to introduce textures and at this point I'm not planning to have a bold dark line. to paint inside of. I'm planning to have the line be an important element but more subdued than my past digital work. Their are many reasons I have kept from going digital before now and there are just as many reasons I've wanted to go digital. In the long run I think digital is going to make my work a ton better and will put me in better standing with the publishers. 

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! 

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.

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!

A Cloudy Day: Part four

In progress illustrations
A change in sky color

As I'm in the process of writing up a newsletter I figured it's about time I put up the cover for my newest children's book "A cloudy Day" so I can link to it. This is just my own text layout as I don't have the final version of the cover available to me at this point. Finishing off the final two spot illustrations for this book tonight so it can head off to print soon!

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.

"A Cloudy Day" : Part Three

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.