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.

Samantha Loses The Box Turtle Cover Design:Part Two

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!

My First Watercolor Video Tutorial !

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.

How to Draw the Human Figure from Your Imagination

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.

How to Make Models and Maquetts

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

What's in a grey? : Making Concrete Observations

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.

Children's Illustration Process

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.

Graduate Pinball Painting Tutorial/process

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.