The Dragons treat

August 3 2009 - I finished the color for "the Dragon's Treat."


It's painted with gouache and watercolor on illustration board.
I've decided that I like watercolor board better.
The illustration board surface gets rough when a lot of water is used.

July 24 2009- I received some more comments from the SCBWI forum and made changes to the image and went to tight line art.



Next is to start to figure out the color.
I plan on doing a color wash over the whole image with watercolor and then going in with gouache to do the rest of the color.
After that I'll probably go back over the line work and give it more variation.


July 23 2009- Ok, I have reworked the rough after receiving comments from the SCBWI forum boards.
Here it is.


I made the image space larger to give the dragon some breathing space and show more of the balloon.
I also added in the tail.

July 22 2009- This is my rough for another possible portfolio piece.
It's a boy and his grandma feeding a dragon his favorite treat...Oreo cookies.
Grandma's got a purse full of them. I think I'll have some sugar packets and stuff falling out of the purse as well.
I'm still trying to decide if the dragon will be a boy or girl.



I know it's really rough, but if you see anything that stands out as "wrong" or have an idea that will enhance the work, let me know.

Depending on how this turns out, I just might use the grandma and boy as the focus of the next batch of drawings.
I think I'll add a little dog as well.

PatriRATic

This is the final art for the previously posted line art.
It's painted with water color and guoache.
I added the story element using Illustrator and Photoshop.


If I were a story writer I'd be able to flesh this idea out into a story.

IF - Tango

This is one of the results of working on new images for my portfolio.
It's painted with a combination of water color and gouache.
It's posted here for "IF" because the bat creature's name is Tango.



My intention here was to show a simple/common scene of a bus stop with some fantasy elements.

Balloon Ride

Previously, I posted a sketchbook page of a boy and his dog in a balloon dragging the clouds out of the sky.
I liked the image, so I reworked it. Mainly because the balloon was in the shape of a butt ( old school joke with my friends).
I changed the format to horizontal and made the balloon a normal shape and zoomed in so that the viewer is closer to the boy and his dog.
I added a couple of birds for interest and depth. I also opened up the clouds and added the earth below. It will be farmland. Simple rectangular shapes of color. I added a barn and the horizon line for scale/depth.
I wanted to add more "story" to the image so that it works as a children's book image.

Here's the tight line art.



I'll be painting it with watercolors and possibly colored pencil and gouache.

I have also worked up two other images for possible inclusion to my portfolio.
The first is a bit of a fantasy piece.



As you can see, it's not over the top Fantasy. Ogres and Knights and stuff.
I wanted a normal scene with fantastic elements.
I usually make everything up from my head/memory, but this time I went to google and found images of what I wanted to draw and used them to help me be a bit more realistic/accurate.
Here are some of the images I used for reference.







This will be painted in watercolors also.

The second image was drawn because I went through a short jag of drawing rats in my sketchbook.

In this page of my sketchbook you can see that the rats started out as simple shapes where I was exploring how to draw them in as many poses as possible.



In this page you see that I started to make them more complicated.



If you take a look at the top right corner you'll see where the rat for the following image came from.



I was drawing this page of rats while watching a show about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, which explains the wings on his back.
This one will also be painted with watercolors and possibly colored pencil.
I'm thinking the background stripes will be red and white and the rat will be done in blue/grey.

Line up for Lincoln

For the last several days I have been working on new art for my portfolio.
I'm gearing up for a new push to make a presence in the children's illustration market and to put a foot into the editorial and advertising markets.

As a part of that I have been working on images of famous people. Starting with Historical personalities.
The previous post showed the finished art for Washington.
This post is to show the line art for the Lincoln rough.



After doing the line art for Lincoln, I decided that he needed a background element. I decided to do an outline of the state of Illinois. The Land of Lincoln.

Today I will be starting to paint him up with watercolor and pencil. I haven't decided yet how I will paint him since all of my reference is black and white. I'm leaning towards a sepia tone approach, so we'll see what happens.

Edit:

I painted Lincoln today.



Watercolor and brown and black colored pencil.

George Washington slept here.

((I posted this to IF because it has a "shaky" connection to history.))

Yesterday I started the color work on the George Washington drawing posted a couple of days ago.
This afternoon I finished him up.



The reason the background is washy and incomplete is that I intended for it to be cropped out to have a white background.
Like this.



The overall coloring is in green because he's standing behind the frame of the dollar bill.

Busy Work

This morning I am going through my stash of saved art. The actual hand drawn art from the '80's to today.
It's time to purge the old art so I can have the space and move on.
I am scanning anything that I might want for future use - reference, website,client samples- and throwing almost everything out.
It's going to take awhile.

Famous and Famouser

I'm in the process of working up ideas for new portfolio samples and I drew these up as a deviation from my usual children's book art.





I've mentally pigeon-holed myself into doing only "children's book" style art in the past few years and I would really like to expand into some editorial/magazine/newspaper type work. So I'll be developing these and others for a separate portfolio.
I figure I'll do famous people. Historic and modern day. Politicians,musicians, actors,...