getting back into the groove

I have been a real slacker on my blog this month...well I can't honestly say I've ever been very consistent. But I was listening to an interview yesterday on CBC where it was said that consistent writing makes you a far better communicator in general, and I could use some help!  At 42 I'm feeling like dementia is setting in already - words constantly escape me. Some say it's just mother's brain, and I hope they are right!!  But perhaps writing will help too.

I continue to find great little tidbits online that would be so helpful to go back to regularly as I educate myself in writing and illustration. This morning my surfing lead me to Brian Lies' blog where he focuses on sharing his characters and his process...really neat work!!

Winter Chickadee

I am not yet ready to call myself an illustrator. It still feels dishonest to me. But perhaps I've come one step closer.  I have been a member of 'Drawing Tutorials Online' for a couple of years now, it's a fantastic site and if you are looking for an online art class it's absolutely the place to be.  In January I entered a DTO contest. The theme was "Winter" and the only rule was that the image had to be a black and white image drawn in graphite or col-erase pencil.  I participated simply for the experience, with no expectation at all of winning.  

The winners were announced a few weeks ago and the three finalists' work was AMAZING! I wish I could share them on my blog, but alas they are on a private site for the students at DTO and I don't think I'm allowed to snag them.

The most amazing thing about the contest for me was that I received an honorable mention!! I am still on a high from Matt's comments about my image - so complementary and encouraging. Best of all he thought this image/style really fit children's book illustration.

So thank you Matt Archambault for your encouragement and making me feel like I might just have it in me to be a children's book illustrator one day...

Character Design Exercise

One of my favorite character designers is Peter deSeve - how can you not!  Recently I took out a compilation of his character designs from the library, both me and my children looked through his sketches over and over.
I think that coming up with creative characters are so challenging. I suppose it comes with practice, but to really think outside of the box is even more of a challenge.On that note, today I came upon a post with an amazing idea to do exactly that - think outside the box and create unique characters.  Here is the exercise ! Thanks to Letters From Schwarzville for posting!...note not only is this a great exercise for illustrators, I think it would be a fun challenge for grade school kids. Heck, I'm going to save this for a fun rainy day activity from my children.

sketches

It's been a long time since I have posted some of my 'homework' from Drawing Tutorials Online, so here are a few recent sketches...







In the evening so as not to completely waste my time watching 'Dancing with the Stars', I have been doodling and working on some little characters. Here are a few of my favorites.

Lynne Chapman

Lynne Chapman posted another video, this one about sketchbooks and the love of drawing...I had to add this as well today since I find her inspirational!

Lynne Chapman on Sketchbooks from Open College of the Arts on Vimeo.

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.

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!)

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.

So, I had a thought - perhaps the image I uploaded earlier had to be in RGB rather than CMYK, let's see if that works...much better! I'll have to remember that!

Yesterday, whilst overcoming a very bad cold and sitting with the boys who I occupied with "An American Tail", I made my first attempt at colorizing a sketch with Photoshop. For my illustration class this week we were working on character development. My character is a 5 year old boy, shy, kind and helpful who likes dinosaurs. Here's a sketch of him and my attempt at coloring his head in Photoshop. Interestingly, the color did not transfer when I uploaded it. He's not supposed to be blue.

I should note that for coloring the head I used a great three part tutorial that I found on-line that was posted by Tom Richmond.