What Do You Say to A Butterfly When You Fall Down a Chimney?

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The answer is “My friend, we are in some deep trouble.” When I add the color the background will be dark gray and the boys will be soot black.

Pen and ink rescued with Photoshop.

Jimmy in the chimney

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This my backup drawing. My pen and ink drawing sucked so bad that I tried to fix it in Photoshop and made it worse, a thousand times worse. So, I scanned my sketch book at a high resolution and cleaned up the coffee stains and chicken scratches. That’s all I can say about my progress today. I’m going to go take a shower now.

A Big Day for Drawing Chimneys

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With the wind beneath my Rotring Tikky pen I rolled out 3 images today. Rolled the hell out of them, in fact. When the deadline approaches, you get pragmatic.

These three chimney images are used for the big action sequence. I may add another. I won’t know if I need another image to complete the sequence until I add the text. By the way, I’ll be doing the text on its own layer. And any backgrounds will be on their own layer. Yes, I’m going modular.

Momma Jay is angry with Jimmy Jay

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Today’s drawing show Momma Jay realizing the Jimmy Jay has broken her solemn rule: Do Not Go Near The Chimney.

A couple of things can be improved. She’s angry, so the left arm should be straight, not in a waving-farewell pose. The right hand might look more determined if she was making a fist. Rather than having her typical soft curls, she needs some spikes to reflect her turbulent feelings. I thank my darling partner for these observations — she has a great editorial eye.

Daily Progress Report: All cross-hatching is forbidden

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We’re moving right along, folks. According to my calculations, which I hope are wrong, I have 16 more drawings to ink in the next 11 days. The gist of it is that I have to finish all of the artwork by March 7, because, on that day I’ve scheduled myself to start adding color, and simultaneously start learning enough about InDesign to create an e-book. Yes, I’m starting to feel some decent pressure now. To meet my self-imposed deadline, I have to pick up the pace and do two drawings a day, which I’ve never done before. But I have a plan.

The plan is that everything has to get simpler. I realize that this should have been the plan from day one, but better late than never. This obvious truth dawned on me yesterday when I realized that hatching consumes enormous amounts of time. I make literally thousands of pen strokes to create the illusion of form and value. And, the larger the image, the number of hatch marks are squared. As the project manager, I now forbid myself from any kind shading, hatching, cross-hatching, or contouring.

Now that I’ve settled the hatching issue, let’s move on. March 31 is now 38 days away and there’s a helluva lot to do.

Fear drawn in pen and ink

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Today I inked the “fear” drawing. As usual I applied hatching to give the flat areas some form, but when I stood back and reviewed the finished sketch, I felt that the hatching looked clumsy, and I used Photoshop to remove all hatching except for Jimmy’s beak. I’ll deal with form when I start applying color.

I’m going to have to add some eyebrows to get a little more fear into this picture.

Drawing emotion in children's books: fear

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When I look at children’s books in Barnes and Noble I think that I should stop looking at children’s books. For one thing, I don’t want to be influenced by them. Most of them seem so…safe. I don’t want to start thinking that I should tone down my little drama until it’s bland and boring and safe.

As a kid I was happy that my parents were completely oblivious to what I was reading. They were just happy that I was staying off the street. Without a protective parent monitoring my reading, I drifted to the grim tales where the bad guys and the witches got what they deserved. Rumpelstiltskin stomped himself down to Hell. The wolf is brutally hacked to death by the burly woodcutter. Clever Jack gets his hands of some magic beans and ends up killing an endangered species giant. Clever Hansel and Gretel burn the witch to death in her own oven. Those fairy tales were brutal and satisfying to the bone. When the smart kids outwit and overcome malevolent adults you have a real children’s book.

In my children’s book, Jimmy Jay and Buddy Butterfly are doing dangerous stuff they shouldn’t be doing, but they do it anyway. They’re going to be in peril. Of course they’ll survive and maybe, just maybe, learn something from their experience. I’ll put it this way: I’m writing the story that I would have liked when I was a kid.

I’ll ink this sketch tomorrow.

Buddy Butterfly standing triumphant on top of the deadly chimney

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Today’s step forward shows Buddy awash with self-congratulation as he stands on top of the forbidden chimney. He’s definitely a risk-taker and something of an attention hound.

I have a hard time visualizing digital images. I want to see every images that I’ve created so far but my mind becomes a blur when I try to recall of the the drawings I’ve done. To get organized, I’m going to assemble my digital images into a gallery that I can print out as thumbnails.

Perspective added to sketch using Photoshop's skew tool

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Yesterday I used the Photoshop “skew” tool to create some diagonal perspective with roof shingles. In the process I skewed Buddy Butterfly’s body. Today I unskewed his body by patiently using layers and masks to block out the deformed Buddy on the skewed layer to let the real pretty Buddy on the layer below show through. Photoshop is a lifesaver.

The One Where Photoshop saves you a bucket-load of time

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Today’s drawing shows Buddy Butterfly flying off to do something crazy and dangerous. As I drew the roof of the house I tried to draw shingles in a semi-realistic way. When I finished, I sat back and saw that the shingles running parallel to the bottom of the page looked static. Rather than redraw the page, I decided to change the roof in Photoshop by using the skew tool to create some diagonal perspective lines.

Skewing the layer added some interesting perspective, but it created another problem — I messed up Buddy’s body. I’m posting the two Photoshop layers I’ll be working on tomorrow. The slideshow shows the before and after skew problem that I’ll fix one way or another.