Elves!

The other day one of my regular clients contacted me to illustrate a short story for them.
It involves a couple of elves running from a bug.
Below are a couple of the roughs for the project.
I can give them art that's pretty rough because they have worked with me for several years and know the quality of my final art
They also pulled samples from my web site...

http://www.robertsnyderillustrates.com/Trade8.html

and

http://www.robertsnyderillustrates.com/Trade12.html


and told me they would like it to look like the sample art. So we both have an idea of what the final art will look like.





They gave basic direction for each page, so I follow that in the rough stage and then add some other interesting things to look at in the art that don't distract from the flow of the story. In this case it will be forest animals reacting to the main action.

The setting is a forest of birch trees that has a small hut that the elves will be running to and going inside at the end of the story. I've been wanting to do a forest scene for awhile, so this project is perfect.
I'll post some tighter line art after comments/changes are made on the roughs.
I'm sending them all of the roughs today, so hopefully I'll have comments tomorrow or Thursday and I can get to work on it again.

Play Kitchen

Well, it's been a couple of months without a regular flow of work coming in so I agreed to build a play kitchen for a friend of the family. It will be a Christmas present for her daughter.

This is based on the one we saw on the net when we were looking for one for our daughters Christmas present last year.
Since I have some skills, I decided to build it myself. Our friend saw ours and asked me to build one for for her.
Posted below is the rough idea for her to approve before I go get the supplies and start building.







I'll publish pics of it as it goes along.

I used Google sketch up to create the rough art. It's a fun program that I'm learning to use for projects like this and also for my illustration work. I recently used it to layout a house and downspout for my latest book, "The Itsy Bitsy Spider" from Ideals Publishing, due out spring of 2009.

You can see a couple of images from the book here.

http://drawntoyou.blogspot.com/

It was great for rotating and looking at all of the possible angles. It made figuring out perspective a whole lot easier as well.

I'm considering doing some nursery rhyme art for my portfolio soon so I'll be using sketch up to lay out elements for those images as well.

Introduction

No matter what you might think, this blog will be used to "expose myself" as a working Illustrator.
I work mostly for products in the children's industry so there won't be any nudity of offensive art on this blog.

I will be posting about the who, what, where, and how of my career as an Illustrator.
Who I'm working for - when I'm alowed to.
How I am creating the work.
And how I look for work.