book project - color

Well, I'm back from Argentina now and ready to 'splain the rest of this project to you. Argentina is very nice this time of the year and actually resembles my studio. In fact, it is EXACTLY like my studio.

When I took on the assignment of illustrating 3 books at the same time, I vastly underestimated the amount of work that was going to be. OY! So for the last month I have been working 12 hour days (8am-8pm) including weekends. OY, OY!

But the good news is, it is now finished! WOOT! While I am catching my breath, I will complete the process for you.


This is the scan of my inked page. It is scanned in at 300 dpi and 100% actual size.


Here is a detail shot of the mom and baby guppy. You can see my wobbly line work and see that all lines are touching... no gaps anywhere. This is important for me in quickly applying the color. Shapes that are not enclosed can be closed up and colored later, but it takes more time... and time is a very valuable thing on this project.


So, here we are. The finished illustration. The client always wants lots of bright colors for younger kids. So I stick to clean, bright colors and dump them in with the paintbucket in Photoshop. Bam, Bam, Bam! It is so quick. If I had to "paint" in all of the colors it would probably double the amount of time it would take to color these... and I don't have that time.

Once I have applied the flat colors I go back and do some actual painting. Like on the eggs. I think if I do a little bit of this here and there It helps add some variety and keeps everything from being so flat looking. I selected the blue of the water and ran a paint brush through it to give some variety there too. "A little dab will do ya" is my thinking. I don't like illustrations where everything has that airbrushed look, but a bit of softness here and there helps. I also change the black line to color on some things which makes the black lines on the main characters pop out more.

If you are interested in the nitty gritty of how I color in Photoshop, just go over to my sidebar and under LABELS click on Photoshop tutorial. This is a step by step of how I do it. I have a newer version of Photoshop now but the process is basically the same.

Well, that's it! I am glad to finally get this project and my blogging about it all wrapped up.

Oh... and I changed the title on this blog. Did you notice? What do you think of the new improved header?

book project - inking

I know what you are thinking. You think I forgot all about promising to come back and tell you about the next step of my book project. After all, that was a month ago. You think I am off hiking the Appalachian Trail in Argentina or something... WRONG! The fact is I have three of these books to illustrate and I have been working furiously to get the other two penciled in. I finally did, and now I am able to get to the inking phase of this book.

Here is my editor approved, 100% full size sketch with revisions and extra cheese. I put a sheet of Clearprint Design Vellum over it to do my inking on. In olden days of yesteryear, I used to trace the sketch onto watercolor paper with a lightbox so I could ink it and color it with watercolor. Now I can skip one whole time consuming step by going right to the inking stage on the vellum. At this point I can still make slight adjustments in the placement of things by just moving the vellum a bit to put the object in a slightly different position. The tweaking never ends...

Here are my archaic tools. I found this old ink bottle holder many years ago. It keeps my ink bottle from sliding off my drawing board. I don't like the narrow openings on most ink bottles so I found this little bottle with a wide mouth that I fit into the holder. A few rounds of duct tape helped it to fit in the hole better. Duct tape just makes everything better doesn't it? I have tried different pen points, but seem to just like the basic #102 crowquill available at any art store. And there is the little piece of paper where I test the ink to make sure it is flowing before I put the point on the REAL thing.

Here I am pretending to be inking, but I'm really just holding my pen while I fumble around with my camera in my left hand and try to take a picture. I have spent a large part of my life influenced by and imitating comic strips and editorial cartoons. I love the line work of many artists from Ronald Searle to Walt Kelly to Jeff MacNelly to Bill Watterson to Charles Schulz... the list goes on and on. I seem to be addicted to the black line. And I like the feel of drawing on real paper and inking with a real dip pen. I may end up doing all this digitally someday... SOMEday... but not today. Today I will get actual ink on my actual fingers. And it ain't easy to get that stuff off, believe me!

OK, now I have to get the linework into my computer and my Epson scanner does this for me. 80% of all the illustration I do fits on the basic 8.5 x 11 inch vellum and I can scan it. About 20% of the time I have a larger illustration and have to scan it in sections and stitch it together in Photoshop. Once I have scanned in the inked drawing, I can clean it up in Photoshop with the eraser. I usually end up dragging my finger through the wet ink somewhere and Photoshop has saved me thousands of dollars that I would have spent buying white out paint.

Oh, if you happened to miss out on the first installments of this project, just click on "book project" over on the side bar and you will be up to speed in no time. chop chop

Well, now we are all ready to color this piece. I will post something about that soon. But first... I need to go to Argentina and do some hiking.

book project - revisions

No matter how hard you try on your sketches, there are going to be revisions. Revisions are like the weird aunt at a family reunion that you try to avoid, but when they come along it is best to be nice and just hope you can get it over with without too much pain.

I got a call from the Art Director and we went through the changes on the book sketches. I picked up a red pencil and as we talked, I made some quick notes on the sketches of what the changes were. I was writing really fast and just jotted down some key words that I hoped would remind me later of what to do. Here is the sketch for page 4.
The mother guppy is watching the baby guppies hatch. They don't seem to like empty space in an illustration (I should know that by now), so the suggestion was to put in a few more guppies and to have the mother patting one on the head.

(click to enlarge) You can see my notes in red that say "3 more" and "petting one." I erased one fin on the mother fish and redrew it so she could be patting one of the little buggers. Next, I fired up my copy machine and made a copy of the original. Now I had some little fish that I could cut and paste. I put one under the mom's fin and placed the others to fill up that blank space a bit.

This is a typical change. Out of 21 pages, 14 had some kind of change made to them. But it wasn't too bad. Some things only needed to be shifted a bit, or a character needed to be enlarged some. My old copy machine, scissors, and scotch tape made it all happen. I know what you are thinking, and yes, I COULD have done the changes in Photoshop. But I realized that I could make all of the changes with my copier and scissors, and it is so much fun to actually cut and paste... so that's how I rolled on this one.

It took an afternoon to make the changes and the evening to scan them again. There was nothing on TV that was of much interest to me, so it was no problem to sit around scanning while keeping one eye on the TV.

So here is the bottom line. It is a bit of a bother to make revisions, but it usually results in some better illustrations and a better looking book... and that is what we are all after. Right?

The scanned revisions go back and then all the final images are presented to a group of editors for final approval. After that, I get the "GO" signal and begin on the final art. I'm not sure when this will be, but when it happens I will return to show you my coloring process.

Stay tuned!

sketches done!

Well, here are all 21 pages that I have drawn. This was all done in a week. The good news is the characters were easy to draw, and there were no complicated backgrounds. Just water and some leafy plant things. So now I will scan the drawings, send them off, and wait to hear back from the client. There are usually some kind of changes requested, but I am crossing my fingers and hoping I have got it mostly right.

Whenever I hear back from them, I will post another update on this project and let you see what is happening.

Stay tuned!

book project part 2- Plan B

My thumb just LOVES to have its picture taken. So here it is... one more time. It's holding a blown up version of the small sketch.
In my previous post, I talked about my Artograph. This is a handy thing to have around, but it is a bit of a dinosaur these days. I used it a lot before the computer came along and offered me its amazing bag of tricks. With only a bit more effort, here is PLAN B... enlarging without an Artograph.

I scanned my 1/2 size sketch at 200% @ 150 dpi and printed it out. Now I have an actual sized sketch that I can put on a lightbox or put a sheet of tracing paper over and do the final full size drawing. You can also select parts of the scanned image in Photoshop and move things around and change sizes. Cool. If you are creating your final art on the computer, you can use the sketch as a template to work over. I still like to draw with real pencils and ink with a dip pen. I am a dinosaur. That's why I have an Artograph.

More about inking later, after I get all these sketches done and approved.

book project part 2

Hidee-Ho neighbor, welcome to part two of the book project I am working on.

I think I need to explain a little about this book I am illustrating. This is an educational book which means you will never see it in a bookstore or in a library, or anywhere else. If you happen to be an elementary school teacher or student, you might run across it sometime. Maybe. Who knows?

Here is the printout and a mighty fine photo of my left thumb. Click photo to enlarge... but my thumb gets REALLY big!

This is what I am working from. I received a PDF of the book that I printed out. This has the copy in place on the bottom of each page, and a box where the illo is to go. In the box are the art suggestions for the illo. Yep, I'm a "hired wrist" as a friend of mine likes to say.

And here is my secret weapon! An Artograph. I don't always use this. Sometimes I draw things in using my 1/2 size sketches as a guide. But I have LOTS of pages to draw up, and the Artograph helps me GET 'ER DONE much quicker. And in the illustration biz... quicker is better.

What the Artograph allows me to do is project my sketch and enlarge it to actual size. As I am redrawing the picture, I can make many adjustments. I can move things around on my final page so the composition is better. I can enlarge or shrink something if it needs it. Lots of tweaking can be done and we all know how much fun tweaking is.

If you look closely, you will also see my ever present Car Talk mug full of sweet tea sitting on my Norman Rockwell coaster.

So here is the small version of page six and the new, improved full sized sketch... now with 50% more humor, less fat and more fiber. The beginnings of a very healthy illustration.

At the end of day three I have now roughed in all of the illustrations full size, and when I close my eyes at night I see little fish.

Oh, while I am working I usually listen to the radio. Public Radio is my default station. My local station used to play classical music, but recently they switched over to mostly talk programs. Sometimes it is interesting, sometimes not... sometimes downright annoying. An alternative I just found is an internet station Slacker radio. You can enter an artist and it will create a station that plays similar artists to the one you chose. I entered Michael Buble and now have a station that plays John Mayer, Harry Connick, Jr., Diana Krall, Tony Bennett, Nat King Cole, Norah Jones, and many more. I like it. If you want to give it a try, here is a link to it.

enjoy.

book project part 1-sketches

I have started working on a little educational book. This means I get to eat for another month. Peanut butter doesn't grow on trees, you know. So in celebration, I thought I would do some blog posts along the way to share my process.

(click to enlarge photos)
The first step is always setting down with the print out of the book pages, and making quick, little thumbnails of each page. This mostly gets me acquainted with what will appear on each page, and I take a rough stab at where things might go. This book has a tadpole as the main character and several other types of fish he meets along the way. Oh, that circled 21 on the page is when I counted up how many pages I was illustrating inside the book... it's NOT my IQ.

I now take another run at going through the book and making larger sketches. This time I work more on the composition and character designs as I go through it. I have found that I do a better job working small for some reason. When I try to draw full size, I get bogged down in the drawing and placement of things. It's much easier for me when I work small, so I made a template of pages that are about 1/2 actual size and made some copies of it to draw on.

This is the end of day two. I hope to have all pages drawn full size by the end of the week.

Isn't this exciting?

(yawn)... more TK.