Chore Day, Aug 31, 2019: Bernie the Buddhist Dachshund hears noise in the chimney

As I wrote the title for this post, I thought, Damn, I’m good — I broke every SEO “best practice” possible: vague title, nothing about the children’s book, no informative keyword that a search engine can make any sense of. It’s highly unlikely that any search engine will index this page in a way that would lead anyone looking for a diary of creating a children’s picture book. The thing is, I really don’t want to spend my time thinking about SEO. I have more interesting things to do. So it goes.

Today was my chore day, with the same chores as last Saturday: cooking for my furry friends and cooking enough food for myself so that I don’t have to cook everyday nest week. I made a pot of spaghetti sauce and a pot of curried cauliflower. As usual, I listened to my favorite Hair Metal bands while I was cooking. There’s only one chore that I didn’t enjoy: cleaning the food processor. The plastic top and complicated locking mechanism are nearly impossible to clean.

On the art front, I updated my “Bernie hears a noise” image. I extended the chimney and gave it a few twists to make it more fun. As a bonus, I added a pink cat to Bernie’s coffee cup.

bernie_heas_boys_in_chimney_blog.png Whimsical, Chimney, updated picture, Procreate, Photoshop

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.

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

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.

The fireplace in watercolor

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My first version of the fireplace in gouache struck me as dreary and too tiresome for a children’s book, so I did it over in watercolor thinking I’d liven it up. I used my Daniel Smith Ultimate Mixing palette for the first time. Even though this palette will allegedly mix 60 bazillion colors, I managed to mix only two, a dark gray for the inside of the fireplace, and an off-white for the bricks. Plus, I photoshopped the bejezuz out of this image to change the color of the wall using a linear burn mask. In other words, this image doesn’t look anything like the original watercolor. I’m fine with that.

Note to self: Muji gel pens run like crazy with watercolor, but they don’t run with Copic markers.

Even though I’ve looked at this fireplace thousands of times, I couldn’t draw it accurately from memory. I used a photo reference for this version.

Jimmy Jay holding his butterfly buddy

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Jimmy Jay, the protagonist of The Jay That Fell Down the Chimney, is holding his pal, Buddy Butterfly. I used a Pentel Pocket Ink brush for the inking. I have two of them, one comes to a nice point, and the other is a almost blunt — that’s the one I used for this drawing. I learned that it’s unwise to use a blunt brush when lots of fine lines are needed.

An hour before I started drawing I was looking through Albrecht Durer’s woodcuts. I really like his clouds and skies. I can say that I need to practice drawing parallel lines and practice keeping even pressure on the ink brush.