IF- Climb

"Okay boys, no climbing in the grocery store please!!"

This will probably be my last post for a bit as new baby is arriving in just a few days. I wish I had had more time this week to work on this sketch. I like the idea, but it's obviously not finished, and I'm a little embarassed by the quality so will not be officially posting it on the IF website this week. It was a good learning experience though. This week I decided to try inking in Illustrator and once again relied on Dani for some guidance.

Authors hiring illustrators

Danidraws does it again. Here is an excellent informational post on authors looking to hire an illustrator.

IF - Pale

"Dancing in the pale moonlight"

Inspired this week by the beautiful colored pencil illustrations of Kathy Hare and suggestions at danidraws to try drawing something new I thought I'd try drawing a ghoul in colored pencil for this week's illo.

Coloring

Since I am very new to digital art processes, I have been very busy this weekend finding some tutorials on the subject. There are so many generous artist out there sharing their process, tips and tricks. Here's a great one by Rivkah that I am going to try to follow this week.

Daily Doodles

The weeks I came across a blog I hadn't seen before by Dani Jones. In fact Dani has a number of blogs, all of which are fantastic, full of info and inspirational. Her sketch blog is filled with "Daily Doodles" all of which she posts at the end of each week; something that I am going to start to incorporate into my daily activities in addition to my weekly IF posts.

As an additional note from Dain Jone's website - for a time when I am ever ready to try and get some professional work - she has found Hire and Illustrator (Hai) to be a worthwhile online portfolio service.

IF - Contained

"Whatever this amazing vessel contained, they sensed they had hit the jackpot."

(Here's one of my first attempts coloring with Photoshop, and using my Intuos3 for the first time...I have a long way to go I know, but I couldn't be more happy with the Wacom!)

Links to keep track of...

Lately in my web surfing I have come across some great links that I want to keep track of...

Classes/Tutorials
The ArtistsNetwork
This is a series of online video classes covering a variety of mediums and techniques. Eventually I do want to try one of these out!

Drawspace has a number of drawing tutorials in .pdf form. Many of these are for the beginner/intermediate artist, I am sure there are many tips I can glean from thse files.

Images as reference and inspiration
I recieved an email from about.com this morning with tons of great websites. Here is the article.
It references examples like Flickr, Veer, Google Image Search , LIFE photo archive and the New York Public Library Digital Archive

Books
The HowBookstore has a great collection of books to consider and at the very least check-out of the library where available.

IF - Resolve

X's resolve to keep his 'sou-sou' is unwaivering.

Catching Up

Happy New Year! I was a lucky girl this Christmas and got a scanner, so now I have no excuses for keeping up with posting my progress in illustration. In the fall I took a wonderful class on illustrating children's books, below are some of the projects that I completed throughout the semester.

The first task was to develop a character - mine was a helful, shy 5 year old who liked dinosaurs...

Here were some of my preliminary sketches:


followed by a pen&ink:

And then the final:
Here was another version of a helpful guy, based on an experience I had with my 5 year old this summer at our cottage:


Another project was to anthropomorphize an object. Here's my exhausted coffee mug...


Finally, we developed a storyboard for "Little Red Riding Hood" and then focused on one scene to develop...



At this point I did a color sketch in watercolor to get an idea of how I wanted to complete the final

And here's the final on Arches Watercolor paper (my favorite parts of this image are the deer on the left side, and the owl). One of the things I love most when I read a children's book, is the times where the reader knows something the main character does not. I don't think I was successful in making it obvious enough, but in this image RR thinks the animals want to play with her - the text clarifies that, but really, what I tried to do was portray the fear in the animals and their desire to warn RR of the danger ahead.