IF Stay

My post for this week's Illustration Friday word: STAY. This is an image I did for my first illustrated children's book "Rudy Reporting for Duty" Unfortunately the book still hasn't been published and I have no control over that. Still hoping that client will one day chose to get it published as it's still one of my favorite books I illustrated. I do kind of wish there was a way I could go back and redo  the illustrations though, now that I've had about five years to improve on my talents.

black and white truck Illustration

Just got a logo/t-shirt /business card design gig at the beginning of the week on a short deadline and already finished by the end of the week. Wish all my projects could be like this. I may do a final color rendition in the future if the client wants that but for nwo he needed something quickly for a truck show he's headed to in a week or so. I started with these rough thumbnails thinking he wanted something a bit more cartoony.

 I soon realized he wanted something to depict a particular model and year with a certain level of detail so from there I eventually got the below design. I also got him a great deal with the printers, $40 off!  If you ever need any truck parts for the sort of truck mentioned below, you can contact him via the e-mail along the top of the image.

IF Launch

This week's word for Illustration Friday is Launch. I could think of nothing more appropriate than my cats favorite passtime. Two of their favorite passtimes are "Launching" and "Plopping". They will launch themselves from the cat tree and land on coffee tables five feet below. They will launch from my lap to my keyboard or from my buearu to my stomach while I'm sleeping. They seem to have this great knack for knowing the exact instant I'm just about to wake up because for some reason I always seem to wake up just moments after one of them launches themselves onto my stomach. Funny how that works. Too bad my sense of humor doesn't kick in until sometime in the afternoon.

    As for plopping, they will plop down and go to sleep on just about anything so long as it's something I happen to be working on. They love to lay down on my drawings and walk over paintings. They really seem to love sleeping on my scanner, keyboard, on my chair etc. The harder they fall and the wider they can streatch out their legs to scatter art supplies, papers, coffee, books or whatever is in reach, the louder they pur. They particularly seem to love plopping down in front of me while I'm trying to walk by them. Over the years this has made me in to something of an olympic athlete in the sport of Cat dodging.

Black and White Line Drawing Kids

I really don't plan to post all of the illustrations from my current books but I just finished off another yesterday and can't resist the urge to post it. So here it is.

The first is the thumbnail sketch, then the pencil line drawing of "gerti" and the turtle. Then the last is the near finished image. The dark black pen and ink lines were working good for the other  spot illustrations of objects but looked horrible for kids faces and hair. I tried a couple fo times and couldn't get a pleasing result with the pen and ink. SO I did a bit more digging looking into other artists. Then I found Denise Brunkus who uses a dark graphite pencil for the line drawing and then fills the drawing in with ink. I loved the soft edges of the pencil for the face contours and the gentle gradation in the hair and the fact that the pencil seemed to be easier to draw lines of varrying width and leave breaks in the line without looking bad. This final image is inspired by that medium and artist.

Mail Art For James Gurney's Contest

Today I was working on the book cover for one fo my books listening to an episode of "This American Life" called "Letters" when I realized today is the day! Today is the day James Gurney posted the mail art he recieved for his contest. I wanted to make a video for his video contest a while back but didn't have time, then wanted to do this mail art contest and ran out of time up till the very last second. Then I realized the post office was closed that day as it was memorial day weekend. SO I asked James if he coudl move the postmark deadline until after memorial day and he did! Yeah! So while I'm not really happy with my entry I did in fact get to enter. Please head over to his blog and vote on the entries today and tomorrow. http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2011/06/envelope-art-contest-please-vote.html There are some great entries by others.

Here's my mail art for the contest.

IF-Shadows

Another Illustration friday image. This weeks word is "Shadows".  Once again I'm chosing an image from my current book I'm working on because this book is filled with shadows.  The book is "allegra Friend of Al Monsters" and will be out sometime this year. I thought about trying to shade this image or paint this one real fast to have the finished image for IF but it would have been silly for me to let IF dictate that process. Anyway, here it is!

Chapter book Line drawings / Black and white Drawings

Final artwork for my first chapter book is underway! For this project, as usual, I started with some small thumbnail sketches of each illustration concept.

Then I chose one of the simplest and favorites to try out some different finished results. Since I've never done finished black and white chapter book illustrations before, I needed to see what style looked the best. I looked at lots of line drawings from other artists to get a feel for what others are doing. I could  go to a museum or pet store to take a picture of a box turtle and then copy the picture detail for detail, with a beautifully rendered pencil drawing, with all levels of shading and value, but that's not what we were going for with this particular project. I hoped to have an end result that would be a mix of realistic and yet have a spark of life and character. Some of the artwork I was looking at was perfectly rendered linework but it was all very even lines with no defferentiation in width adn nothing to help the eye defferntiate between forms in the image. I tried a few things and the client and her family chose the one that works best for the kindle and looks best overall ( Ink line, shaded in ink). I also experimented with digital linework on Inkscape and Illustrator but after a few hours of frustration I realized it would take too much time to get that to look beter than my hand drawn stuff.

Then I went ahead and drew all of the images as line drawings on heavy duty paper and scanned them in. This would allow me at the very least to print them off later in case I made a mistake on the first version.

Then I just went to town with the ink trying to have a variety of values.  

I've got four more of these small spot illustrations to go and about five full page illustrations and one color cover illustration for this book. The working title is "Samantha and the Box Turtle" and will be available on amazon for the kindle and other e-readers sometime this year.

IF "asleep"

This week's illustration friday word is "asleep". It was extremely hard for me to chose one single image to use for this because nearly every book I have ever done has the main character fall asleep somewhere in the book. Kind of makes me want to write  a book where the main characters special ability is that they never have to sleep. I have often wondered what it would be like if our bodies didn't need rest and we could just keep going for days without sleep and without feeling tiered. Anyway, for IF I chose to use a drawing from the book I am currently working on "Allegra Friend of All Monsters"

I thought it would be neat to post my other characters sleeping as well. I had no idea how many sleeping characters I actually had until doing this. These are all from different books and I may have even more I wasn't able to find.
                                                        
                                              "Samantha and the Box Turtle" Coming out this year

                                             "The Caterpillar and the Express Train" available on Amazon

"The Litlle Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday" coming out this year

         

"Spirit Driver"

"Rudy Reporting for Duty" My first Book!

"Clara and the One Eyed Sand Hog" My second Book!

The Monsterous color sample Disaster (with a happy ending) : How I make Color Samples for my Children's Books

I started the color sample stage of my new book a couple of weeks ago and expected to be working on the final art by now. Working with new clients always has  surprises, good and difficult ones. This book was moving along quit fast until we hit the color stage. Till this point I've had the entire color scheme in my head and briefly mentioned my rough ideas to the client a couple of times which he seemed to like. I guess I'm really not great at verbal/written communication though because the first set of color samples were apparently nothing like what he expected. I wanted an overall cool temperature color scheme since the book takes place at night and I wanted to have the warm glow from the lamp as a subordinate color that would dance around the room and light up the cooler objects. That tends to be my style in any image I can work that sort of thing into.

     So I worked on the first six samples for image one just laying in rough colors. They looked awkward with the watercolors painted on printing paper so I went over the colors in photoshop. I hadn't even considered that this now made them all more saturated than what I intended.

The client hated them and felt they clashed and in turn suggested I use very light pinks and an almost white yellow for the walls. So I did samples 7-11 above with the bed blanket sample for referecne. No matter how I tried to explain the whole idea of the nighttime cool colors and warm glow of the lamp I just couldn't get him to see my vision which I had been developing in my head for this book since the first time I read the manuscript oct.29th of 2010.

He kept wanting things lighter and more girly. So for another image I tried the lighter colors knowing this was getting really pastel colored and far from my normal color inclinations.

At this point I began thinking he may be having more problems with the rough quality of the samples than the actual colors. So I sent him some samples from my last book showing the color samples next to the finished art.

I also showed him some finished artwork from other artists along the same lines of what I was envisioning. SO at this point we both agreed that the pastels weren't quit right and I think the finished art of other artists helped to communicate what I intended with my crude color samples. Now I just needed to figure out how to get from our current state of limbo into some colors that would accurately represent what I mean without actually going full scale into the final artwork. Then I got the idea to find reference photos online of rooms painted in various colors. i then cropped portions of the walls and stretched and fitted them to the samples in photoshop.

I feel this gave us samples that weren't too saturated, too light or too dark. The problem is that by the end of it I felt they were essentially the  same color schemes I originally intended so I wasn't sure after all of this work if the client would be Any happier with these. HE WAS !!! SWEET!  He chose 13 and 14 as the room gets lighter towards the end of the book when the sun starts to rise.

Now the situation wasn't completely resolved as I still had to show color samples for other objects in the room like the bed headboard, floor, blanket, lamp, night stand and rocking chair which are key features for part of the book. So I spent two more days working on the color samples below. This is a crazy amount of work to do for mere color samples but I was happy with how fast the drawing stage went and felt it will make the rest of the color samples much easier once we have one image done in more accurate colors to show the main elements. He's seen these and loves them and we are now trying to decide on our favorite or favorite combo. All of that work can only lead to a better final product int he long run!

A brief explanation of my color sample process for the art folk who may visit. Generally I try to use cheap papers where ever possible because at this time in my career I'm not all that worried about having color samples survive after I'm dead. So for acrylic or oils I have some thick paper I got from my grandpa seven years ago that works great for this purpose. For watercolor I use printing paper which is horrible for watercolors but gets  a rough idea of color.  I start by printing the final drawings onto the paper generally two spreads on each 8x10 sheet.
 
           In general I think it's a good idea to keep color samples extremely rough when working on a whole book and only get detailed if your working on one image. However I tend to personally feel like I'm going to lose clients unless I show them a bit of detail so i tend to get carried away. Probably comes from my first book in which the clients actually tried hard to have someone else add color to my drawings once they saw my rough color samples,LOL.
 
      I generally put some acrylic gloss medium on the paper to keep the paints from sinking in too much. Then you basically just go to town filling in rough colors trying to show main light source and colors of main objects. With acrylics and oil samples (and sometimes watercolor) I'm, able to spend about a half hour to an hour for the first sample for a single image. Then I scan that into the comp. and I paint different colors on top of the same sample, scan and repeat till I've exhausted my ideas.
   
     Then I almost always do even more samples once in photoshop. I play with the color sliders and contrast etc. to get all kinds of things I may not have come to on my own. I generally end up with around ten samples for each image in the book but I've had as many as 40 samples for one image before if you can believe it. Color seems to be that one area that clients aren't afraid to keep asking for more and more and more no matter how little they are paying. I never quit understood that but I'm constantly learning and know that this is the main area of my art that I still need to figure out away to streamline. After all we all know that the best part is the final art! FOr children's books the best part is seeing the final art in print : )

IF "Lesson"

I do plan to post some other stuff eventually but for now here's another for Illustration Friday. The word this week is "Lesson".

This image is from my new book "The Little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday" which is due out in May and will be available on Amazon for kindle and as a paperback.  I also did a video tutorial ( or "Lesson") for this illuatration which is available on this blog and on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/sneezingleopard?feature=mhsn

Illustration Friday- Bicycle

My third Illustration Friday post. I found out that TONS of folks stop by the blog from Illustration Friday so now of course I'm hooked! Plus I just happen to have another preconcieved concept that goes along with this weeks word, "Bicylce".

    This was originally a very quick pencil sketch I did in a sketchbook. Not sure what brought it on as it was  a few years back. Now for this weeks IF I decided to make it a bit more of a finished ink line drawing. May color it someday if I ever find the time and may find a way to put it on some zazzle products. For the original sketch I wrote BORN TO BE WILD in some fluid large type, reminicent of John Handcock's signature. If I make this into t-shirts or something I would probably put some kind of humorous saying along those lines in there.

Vermont Oil Landscape Paintings

I just realized I've never posted any of my landscape paintings to my blog. SO I guess now is as good a time as any since I finally got around to posting a few on my etsy shop for sale.  http://www.etsy.com/shop/matthewgauvin?ref=si_shop and of course the snow is finally disapearing which means as soon as my current children's book is done I can get outside and do a few new lansdscapes!!!!

 I really enjoy painting Landscapes as they give me the freedom to paint freely and make my own choices while getting me out of the studio for ala prima landscapes. Unfortunately that is something my children's book art is quit the opposite of most of the time. For children's books I do tons of thumbnails and idea sketches, search for tons of reference photos, consider borders and gutters and bleed and book sizes and text layout. Perhaps most importantly, I work with a client ,who generally has the last say in the final outcome as well as choosing between color choices, compositions and what goes in or stays out of each illustration.

In particular I enjoy seeing landscapes done in thick oil paint. Over the past year I have learned a lot about this from Brad Teare on his blog titled "Thick Paint". Whenever I have time my hope is to delve deeper into thick paint with my landscapes while I'm headed more and more into watercolors and digital for my children's book art.

 

Another artist who I would have to give credit to for helping me in my understanding of landscapes to some degree is Elizabeth Tolley. I picked up her book "Oil Painter's Solution Book : Landscapes" a couple years back and bring it out in the field with me. Excellent book on many levels!

                                      

          

Illustration Friday- Journey

My second image for illustration friday. This is a previouse illustration from my book "The Caterpillar and the Express Train" in which a tiny caterpillar character goes on a long journey on a massive express train on a route between Boston and Miami.

                      more info about the book and book reading video can be found at  http://thecaterpillarandtheexpresstrain.webs.com/

Birthday cake Line Drawing

I have a few minutes to post something tonight but had a hard time figuring out what to post. I've got a ton of great new illustrations for my new book but want to wait til it comes out before posting those. I have a bunch of ladnscape paintings I did but want to wait til I get soem posted on Etsy. I've got a bunch of new character designs I want to post but need more time to write a bit about how I achieved various aged characters. I also have a bunch of in progress posts but all need more work. So for tonight I decide dto go ahead and post a line drawing I did of a birthday cake for my new book "The little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday". This cake line drawing got me thinking about the possibility of doing a coloring book for kids and so one of my clients and I are tossing around the idea.

          I generally don't get a chance to do what I would consider finished line work like this. Usually my line drawigns only serve as  a ground or boundary for me to paint over or within so I don't worry about having good looking energetic lines as much. Actually I used to do mostly oil paint so the lines wouldn't show at all but lately I have been thinking a Lot more about line quality as I moved into watercolors.  I new I wanted line to be an iportant factor in my watercolor art as that is one of the main things my oil paintings were missing. SOmetimes I would love the drawing I did for an illustration but then loose that spontaneous energy when slaving over an oil painting in which the line ulitmately got covered up. It's much easier to swing your wrist with apencil and get a great arch than to do so with an paint brush loaded with thick opaque paint.

       Recently I also got my first chapter book gig in which I will be doing lots of finished line work and now just foudn out about a second chapter book that I will be starting up in the next few months.

Illustration Friday, "Duet"

This is my first ever Illustration friday submission! Lately I've seen artists everywhere participating in this websites weekly drawing exersize and have wanted to participate. I thought I would never have time to do so, but when I saw this weeks word "duet" I immediately had an idea come to mind and decided to stop all else and just sketch the idea to paper as fast as I could. Here's the result. I wish I had time to color it but maybe will do so later. Enjoy! (click for larger image)