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. 

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.

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! 

A Recap of Recent work and link to my Recent WCAX Appearance

I haven't posted much for a while as I've been going in all sorts of directions. The coolest bits of news for me are that I was recently on the VT news WCAX: The 30 with Kristin Van Aken to discuss our book " PIGS! Under the Post Office?"  (linked to vid at end of this post) and leading up to that I finally began a project that I'm working on in collaboration with my wife Barb.

      That project is a series of Illustrated products under the title of "Vermoosin'". She's the mastermind behind it really. I mentioned to her that I've been really wanting to do a line of t-shirts and products centered around a crazy VT moose character and she reminded me that she LOVE's Moose and the brain storming began. I think she thought of the name "Vermoosin'" , she also came up with the name "Kirby" for the moose. This project is in the veeeeery beginning stages still and I actually will likely still do lots of character design and maybe move into a different medium or change the look of the character entirely. I really didn't push the character as much as I wanted to yet. We just wanted to get out some initial designs before the news appearance.  I'll do an official launch once we feel everything is where we want it and have  a good series of products started with a good store, website etc. I have tons of marketing ideas waaaay above and beyond anything I've ever done for any children's books so maybe one day this could be something known by name across Vewrmont! There is  a link on the homepage of my website and I'll get one on my blog soon. To purchase some of the initial designs go to http://www.zazzle.com/sneezingleopard*

Other recent work includes, I recently finished my third book in the samantha series.

I did a quick children's portrait.

I did  some new spot illustrations for the samantha book and a logo for a special edition of those books.

I've been working on thumbnail sketches for my newest children's book " Brave Roger, Little Mumps and Me: Four Stories for Grins and Giggles" By James Mee

For those who weren't able to see it live, here's the vid of Kristin and I on the news talking about our book. http://www.wcax.com/story/22019258/pigs-under-the-post-office  It's always bizzare seeing myself on any sort of video but I'm just happy I was able to get words to come out of my mouth! LOL You can get a copy of the book on amazon but the author's preference for buying is through createspace at https://www.createspace.com/4018119

Hand Painted Sign

       At times i feel like the quote "Jack of all trades, master of none" was thought up to describe my art. I look at other artists websites and blogs and they just seem sooo focused and directed at one specific style of art and often one medium. I don't know if it's my personality or my inability to find enough of the same sort of work to keep myself in business but since the day I graduated from MassArt my art has been all over the board. I've done portraits, architectural illustration, landscapes, pet portraits, logos, children's book, chapter books, editorial illustration, realistic Fantasy, comic art, caricature, banner art, greetings cards,  etc. etc. Well now I'm adding yet another chapter as I officially finished my first Hand painted sign. In this week if you had looked into my studio you would see a huge sign being painted on one table with big brushes, sloppy tubs of paint, rulers, projector, table saw, screws, wood, gesso etc. on another table you would find my small black and white watercolors for my newest Samantha book with tiny brushes, watercolor paper and a small tin of paints, and if you caught me at the right time you would find me on the computer working on my newest logo design, sketching, inking, scanning, photoshopping, inkscaping, and in all cases e-mailing clients.

       I wonder if anyone else ever has that moment of asking oneself "WHAT AM I?!!!" Am I a children's illustrator who does other kinds of art on the side or am I all of these things at once? I can't say i really know the answer to that and I suppose that is why my business cards say Illustrator/Artist. Whatever I am I hope to one day narrow my artistic path but for now I've enjoyed being a part of so many different projects. It's a bit like being at a theme park and trying all of the rides before deciding which one you like the best. I'm a children's illustrator at heart. That is what I've spent the majority of my time studying, researching, working on and admiring and yet I don't think I will ever get rid of the urge to paint landscapes. Regardless of all of that I had a great time working on this sign and seeing what is possible with a little patience and a steady hand. I wasn't sure if I had it in me but now that it's done I'm so glad I had the opportunity! Here's some process photos! The business is "North East Computer Systems Inc" in Lyndonville, VT

Illustrated Valentine's Day Card

Recently I've been working on the third book in the "Samantha Series" , "Samantha Plays Possum" which I will share a bit on soon. As that is currently my only official project I currently have going I've been doing tons of background work on my online stores and getting new things set up for selling my work. One such project involves a new moose character I'm designing. This is probably the first character I've ever been in full charge of designing without input from a client or friends (so far). I'll probably ask for folks advice at some point but for now I'm working a bit in secret until the project is ready to reveal in full. The first test product i've created is a valentine's Day card available on my zazzle store. http://www.zazzle.com/moose_valentines_day_card-137201477789749408

Caricature Drawings

I'm currently in the process of starting up a little side business for my caricature work. This short video describes how this all got started for me and where I'm headed with it via fivver gigs on fivver.com Since I'm still new to Fivver I'm currently only able to list small gigs for $5 but once I've done a few gigs and get good feedback i'll be able to offer more options for higher prices. i briefly touch on that at the end of the video but would like to show in more depth where I'm headed for anyone interested in getting a fuller version caricature done now. Feel free to contact me at matthew.gauvin@gmail.com with questions or to commission me for a caricature or other illustration project.

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.

Imaginative Family Portraits

The last few months have challenged me with a few opportunities to create portrait work. This is something I decided a couple months back that I would like to consider pursuing in a bit more depth. While portraits have never been my specialty and while I do struggle with them I think I found a couple of niches that work for me and give great results for the client and that I enjoy doing. One of those styles is the new style I'm calling "Imaginative Family Portraits". When I told a friend about this he asked me if I was painting an imaginary family for a guy who doesn't actually have a family.

What it actually is is to use various pictures of a family as photo reference and sort of collage them together if needed to get the best qualities from each photo. Then the really imaginative part is in the background or in how we chose to portray those figures. In doing this we end up with various photo references with various lighting situations so I basically have to imagine the light on their faces and often find other photo references to draw the folds on the clothing and such. It's a far cry from having the family sit in front of me to paint or just using one photo to copy meticulously. In the end it's not a traditional sort of portraiture at all but serves as an interesting conversation piece that hopefully at least captures their likenesses.  For this particular image we went through a number of ideas and decided on showing his family snuggled into a background displaying the various family vacations they had been on.

We also worked in various other interesting tid bits from the family personalities like colleges they attended, the restaurant the parents went on their first date at etc.

I would be interested in doing more of this sort of project for the right price. I've done four of these so far and each of them has fallen between 100-200 hrs. from start to finish! So they aren't cheap but could be just the thing for anyone looking for a memorable gift you can't get just anywhere. Feel free to contact me for a quote or inquiries, matthew.gauvin@gmail.com Another style of portraiture I've been experimenting is similar to caricature. I'll show some pics for that image in another post tomorrow.

Revised Illustrations

  

I can't remember the last time I was aggravated enough with an illustration to completely scrap it and repaint from scratch, but with my current book I did that for two illustrations. The first was this "mud pies" image. there were many problems with the first image (orange/warm image on the right) so I went back to the drawing board and was much happier with the bluer version on the left. Took out the parking meter, better lighter spot for the text in the sky rather than over dark mud, darker mud, better color scheme, clearer details and less muddy colors overall. 

The next was this spot illustration of the post office. The client and I did like the first version but I'm pretty picky and saw lots of things that didn't come out as I had planned in my head. SO I tackled it again and like the new version much better. Mostly it was the trees, cloud and sky that made me want to repaint it but int the end I like all those as well as the new Po as well.

Family Portrait Drawing : Imaginative Portrait Illustration

One of the very first projects I ever worked on fresh out of college was a portrait commission for a friend of a friend. I was still soo new to the art world that I relied on a disposable camera to document my art, I hadn't yet purchased a darth vadar like mask to use with oil paints, my only projector had the words "tracer Jr." on the side in colorful bold type and my idea of good quality paper was basically a glorified newsprint paper.

    These of course were non essential to the task at hand, or so I thought).I jumped right into the portrait and felt I had done a decent job of it. I spent about five hours drawing the fellow and his wife from a small, grainy badly lit 5"x6" photo prvided. Then I had fun scribbling in the background with some dark charcoal making what I thought of as  a "cool" and "interesting" texture to fill the space.It was meant as an engagement gift for his wife. Then we agreed to meet at the local subway sandwich shop (where I worked at the time) to exchange payment for the final art. I actually remember making sandwiches when I saw him come in as my heart began to beat faster. At some point I found the time to run out back, grab the rolled up charcoal image and darted out to the table where he waited. I unrolled it real fast with my subway apron still tied around my waist, he nodded and said it looks good and handed me the cash. Probably the weirdest transaction in my whole career.

Of course now I do things extremely differently to the point of meticulously giving clients updates and asking for their advice, ideas and changes along the way so that I know they will be happy with the final product.  At the time of that portrait I didn't know much at all about portraiture and how difficult is really is to get a likeness of someone. When you think about the millions upon millions of people int eh world living and those who have passed on and how each face is different enough to be told apart from all the others. How is that even possible? and for the artist, how is it possible for us to represent each individual so precisely with mere pencil marks on two dimensional surface? Now seven years later I have only begun to scratch the surface of this dilemma as that was basically the last portrait commission I accepted from that point forward. The fellow came back and wanted adjustments which I did but it made me look at the portrait from a
more critical standpoint and realize I hadn't done a very good job at all. In the years that followed everything I learned about portrait art only served to enforce in me the realization that I don't have what it takes to be a portrait artist.

However something weird kept happening to me over the years of illustrating children's books
that I couldn't figure out how to escape. These independenat selp publishers were coming to me with book ideas and wanted me, time and time again, to use there own kids as reference for the main characters. I've done about twelve books to date and I would be hard pressed to point out the few where the clients didn't request that. So while I thought I left portraiture in the graphite powder (dust) I found that instead I was accepting gigs where I was now required to create entire character designs based off a few low res photos of kids who may or may not look the part. While this proved to be a time consuming and difficulttask it did help me learn how to study each subject critically and find the tiny details that make each kid unique. I also learned to draw various hair styles I probably would have been afraid to touch if I had just been designing my own characters.

     Now after years of drawing kids and adults alike and learning to create characters based on photos I have finally begun to learn the skills needed to consider portrait art with a new perspective and less trembling. Sometime a few years back I had a difficult time finding steady illustration work so I filled the time by doing some art competitions on the side. The image below is one such image. This was probably one of the first illustrations I had done that wasn't for a class assignment or for a client. Needless to say I had tons of fun with the image. I had no idea at the time that it would be the first of a series of illustrations I'm calling "Imaginative Portrait illustrations". This wasn't Even necessarily intended to be a self portrait but  did indeed use photos of myself as reference and the image is just as much about my own struggle with college loans as it is for any college student in debt.

I won second place for that contest and got a great piece of art that was shown in a couple of shows since then. But more importantly this image lead to more work! Soon after I was contacted to do a portrait illustration of a guy and his brother riding dinosaurs in outer space on a rainbow road. For some reason I accepted thinking " i can do that!"

Again I didn't see this image as a straight forward portrait and so convinced myself to accept the gig. The image as a whole had a lot to do with a very personal subject matter that one of the brothers was going through and so it tells a part of his life story. Again I thought, what an awesome piece! yet I still had no idea how I could get more projects like that. Until finally I was contacted by a client to do a portrait of his parents for their fiftieth wedding anniversary.

With this illustration things began to come a bit more into focus. I spent a couple hundred hours drawing the fifteen family members and the couple in various ages and various settings and working with the client to represent his parents lives on one canvas. It was a long and difficult task and one that sent me running back to the world of children's books with open arms for another couple of years, LOL. Yet I received lots of great feedback on the image and yet again found myself wanting more.

   Today I'm introducing a new portrait in this series for the same client as the one above. I'm still ironing out the details with the drawing and portrait portion but will be headed to paint soon! This one focuses on the portrait aspect far more than the others while still having a healthy does of additional background filler describing the lives of the family as a whole. As I work on the image I realize how much I love doing these and wonder if this isthe sort of thing other families or individuals might want. I'm considering offering this as a new service and possibly even start up a whole separate website geared towards these imaginative portrait illustrations. I'm thinking I would offer traditional graphite portraits at various price levels, traditional painted portraits and then at the high end would be the full blown imaginative portraits. These could practically be about just about anything the client can imagine them and their loved ones doing. riding unicorns through the clouds, submerged under the sea in scifi like underwater vehicles, or like the one below which has the family juxtaposed against a background of various family vacations and places of note in their lives. These would be for those who's families already have everything money can buy and who have a bare wall screaming for some sort art representing the family. I haven't worked out all of the details yet but I certainly expect at some point to try actively seeking out these sorts of projects. Now as I look back over the years I wonder what ever happened to that first protrait I did. Did the guy hang it on his wall or did he just buy a new gift for his wife and throw the image aside? Could he ever have possibly imagined that roughyl seven years later the young student who created that crude portrait would have made such large strides? What do the next seven years hodl ins tore for me as an artist? Time will tell. There is only one thing I know for sure whcihis that I will probably despise all fo the art I'm currently creating as I hope to have improved ten fold by then.

detailed view of the portraits.