A Clip STudio Paint sketch with a pencil-like brush. With the days getting longer a few minutes each day, I’m optimistic that Spring and Summer are right around the corner, and with them, the return of the weekly meeting of the Al Fresco Art Club. Hooray!
Today was another Chore & Al Fresco Art Club day. The chores were the same as always. The Art Club Challenge was a little out of the ordinary: find an appealing magazine illustration or book cover and copy it. I chose beginner’s guide to digital painting in Photoshop: characters, from 3DTOTAL Publishing. Ironically, I used Procreate for this sketch.
Today’s Al Fresco Art Club challenge was to do something for my web site. I decided to make a banner image for this site’s future landing page. The landing page will feature my illustration work and will highlight my books. I want to (eventually) populate the site with my comic characters.
I did some brainstorming today and sketched several pages of potential ideas. I put the most time into the design below, with Jimmy Jay and Buddy Butterfly pushing massive letter block into place. I realize that if I want to get the idea fo “massive” across, I’ll have to make the blocks bigger or make Jimmy and Buddy smaller.
My work flow was:
Brainstorm for an hour and come up with a dozen graphite sketches.
Find the best candidate and ink it.
Photograph it and import It into Procreate.
Get confused and frustrated working with the iPad Pro.
Go back to basics: scan the sketches I created in step one.
Open them in Photoshop and feel better.
I’m in the first stage of creating my second children’s picture book: I’m writing the story. As I’m writing, I’m doing some sketches as notes to future myself so that I’ll be able to remember the image I had in mind when I wrote the words.
Along with many animal drawings, I’ll be drawing some tropical landscapes and Mayan temples. I’ll be introducing a reptile, a jaguar, and a Caracara Eagle, keeping everyone as cute as a button.
Today I sketched examples from Jack Hamm’s Drawing Scenery: Landscapes and Seascapes. I dozed off halfway through the session and lay my head on the kitchen table for a snore.
76/365
With only 28 days until my self-imposed deadline for publishing my first children’s picture book, I decided to rough out the remaining images in pencil. Knowing the end is near is a good feeling. The next step will be to ink these sketches as quickly and efficiently as possible. Line ‘em up and mow ‘em down, so to speak.
When I see how simplified my drawings have become, compared to the rendered and colored drawings I drew at the beginning of the project, I’m concerned that my style as of today, Sunday March 3, 2019 is very different from my style in December, 2018 when I started this project. My optimistic takeaway is that I’m learning and improving as I work. The unintended side effect of improving is that my older drawings need to be redrawn to match my current style.
These six sketches are placeholders. After I ink these roughs they will serve as very fuzzy guidelines to aid me as I’m inking like crazy, on a wing and a prayer.
75/365
Today’s drawing went through these steps:
Pencil thumbnail in small sketchbook (done about 2 months ago)
Pencil sketch in production sketchbook, done today. The following steps took about one hour.
Inked with Rotring Tikky
Scanned with Plustek A3 scanner
Airdropped to iPad Pro and re-inked in Sketchbook
Airdropped to iMac
Edited in Photoshop — cleaned up and contrast fixed
Exported to iCloud storage as a PNG
Uploaded to Squarespace
The most important steps in the process is drawing and inking with pen and paper. Working with real things gets my brain in gear. Digital is for fixing things.
22/365
I’m starting to feel the my days dwindling down to March 31. As of today, I should be drawing a complete page every 3 days. Yesterday I faced the obvious fact that I haven’t got a single page drawn in the 21 days I’ve been on this project. So, today I thought I’d better get started even if I don’t feel ready. I thought the books should start with a two-page image that introduces the Jaybird family, Momma, Jenny, and Jimmy Jay.
Rather than having them flying south, I thought I’d have them take the bus instead. This seemed like a good idea since I haven’t really worked out whether my birds will have arms with hands and fingers, or have wings. And if they have wings, how would they carry their luggage, which looks quite heavy.
I’ll be working on my lettering and wavering daily on the color palette for this story.
Another Jaybird that turned out older than he should have. I’ll just say that he’s one of Jimmy’s uncles.
Day 4/365
I started this drawing thinking I would be clever and draw the last page first. I read this Hergé used this strategy. Just as I started to ink this page I thought of a better page. Maybe this will be the next to the last page. Maybe I’m not up to Hergé’s level…yet.
My materials included pencil, nib pen and ink, water soluble graphite, and a couple of Copic markers for the little butterfly, who has become a central character in the story…as of today, as of when I was coloring him with the markers. Yes, it’s pretty wild inside my head.
