68/365
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.
65/365
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.
47/365
Today I drew my first cover page based on the storyboard I completed yesterday. I got the idea that the cover should show Jimmy Jay standing jauntily next to the chimney he’s going to jump down in the course of the story. I want him to look confident and safe. I want the readers to feel that even though he’s going to do something daring and dangerous, he’s going to be okay in the end.
I first sketched in pencil and was about to ink it when I got the crazy idea that it would be faster to do digitally on my iPad. Wrong! After a few minutes of struggling to find a decent Procreate brush to mimic my ink pens, I realized that I’d been overcome by digital was somehow better and faster than old-fashioned pen and ink. I put on the brakes and ditched the iPad. I pulled out a sheet of tracing paper, inked with a Uni-ball liner, and then scanned it. Ooops! I scanned the wrong side of the paper and got a fuzzy, but appealing, scan with interesting texture and a nice blurry glow.
I’ll do take cover page take #2 tomorrow.
Got to work on the crossed legs…the line of action and the center of gravity don’t work together..
40/365
A busy day with my square job annoyingly cut into my drawing time. Rather than doing something lazy, such as posting a picture of my new A3-size scanner, I thought I’d do a quick iPad sketch. This upward-facing view is a first attempt at drawing a “Keanu”, the Keanu standing in the rain in “Break Point” howling a grief-stricken “NOOOOOOO!” to the indifferent heavens.
All digital today with no regrets or self-recriminations.
A quick sketch that’s telling me to work on my up-nose perspective skills. And foreshortened hands, too.
32/365
Today was a busy family day. In keeping with the plan to make progress every I resorted to a quick sketch of Jimmy Jay and Buddy Butterfly playing some football. I’m amused at the thought of a butterfly catching a football launched by a jaybird with a rocket for an arm. The thing is, Buddy actually catches the ball and fires it back.
With time running short I inked the sketch in Photoshop then applied some color. I’ll revisit this tomorrow and add a background.
31/365
Ah, the magic and mystery of Photoshop! On one hand it gives, and with the other it takes away. I used PS to clean up the watercolor image I made a few adjustments and added some cleanliness at the cost of some of watercolor’s magic randomness.
I removed the background, added shadows and highlights, speed lines, moved Jimmy to the background, and re-inked the outlines of Jimmy and Buddy. This took about 2 hours. I’m quite a novice with Photoshop and tasks always take longer than I think they should. I always have the feeling that I’m fighting against an invisible giant when I’m in Photoshop.
One other big difference is that I switched to my pen display today. Lately I’ve been using my Wacom Intuos Pro, the big one, but I’ve been looking at lots of reviews of the new Wacom Cintiq 16 and got the itch to reinstall my Huion drivers. I made all of the edits with my Huion GT 220 V2, which also has a stylus with 8000+ levels of sensitivity. I do prefer the feel of the Wacom stylus, but I work much faster on the pen display. What’s more relevant: feel or speed? Time will tell.
Compare this painting to the original posted yesterday.
In my hands, Photoshop removes much of the original watercolor’s charm. Sigh!
24/365
Now that I’ve got my studio set up for traditional media, with a real sketching area with a tilting drawing board, I’m realizing that drawing with pencil and paper is way more fun that sliding a slick plastic “pencil” over a hyper-slick glass surface. I have this realization three or four times and year, then I gradually feel an urge to go back to digital drawing, where I can just upload directly instead of going through a scanning and clean up process.
Now that I’m drawing actual pages for my book, I still don’t feel like I have a style, but I’m leaning toward pen and ink again. The color in the drawing below is digital, but it’s so loose and sloppy that it reminds me of my watercolor paintings, which is fine with me. I’m not a purist about watercolor. If the digital color looks good, it’s good enough.
I’m going to have to exercise my editing eye with those trees…maybe one too many dreadlocks?
14/365
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.
12/365
My goal for this painting was to practice using the least number of brush strokes possible to apply the color to my sketch. My gouache and watercolor paintings suffer from my tendency to use too many faint-hearted little strokes but today I really piled on the gouache in a series of single, heavy strokes. I gave myself a pat on the back.
I did all of the line work in Photoshop and also touched up the stray paint and other marks. This character is the little boy who lives in the house with the chimney that animals like to fall down into every year. In this picture, the boy, who doesn’t have a name yet, is pointing to the chimney and yelling to his grandmother that there’s something inside the fireplace. I’d like to get more feeling into this gesture, and more alarm into his face. It looks like I’ll have to photograph myself yelling with a little fear in the eyes, or maybe Muybridge can help out.
11/365
I spent my painting time putting together the sketch and color layers I created yesterday. I thought it would take about an hour, but it took much longer. I spent more time on the digital compositing than on the actual drawing and painting. Photoshop is an awesome and seductive time sink. Still, I like what I can do with PS. I’m happy working in a hybrid way, using traditional media to create and digital to get it ready for publication.
The final image of two day’s labor… One of the problems with animal characters is what to do with their tails. Notice that Jimmy doesn’t have a tail, but Topaz does.
Hmmm. It looks like I’ve mislaid Topaz’ eyepatch.
