Lamp Post Guild - Thumbnails

Lamp Post Guild update!

The course that I'm taking is all about developing personal work and the course consists of creating a series of illustrations, which can be tied together by a story or theme.

The illustration series that I've embarked upon is based off of George MacDonald's collected fairy tales. For the uninitiated, MacDonald was a writer who may not be terribly known these days, but who greatly influenced C.S. Lewis. A number of times while reading MacDonald's fairy tales, I was reminded strongly of the way that Lewis wrote "The Great Divorce", "The Screwtape Letters" and The Chronicles of Narnia.

MacDonald wrote eight fairy tales, which are now compiled into a single book. So for my series, I've decided to illustrate a single scene from each story. I tried to pick scenes that, while magical and narrative, do not spoil the entirety of the plot or the conclusion. Rather, most of the imagery is pulled from junctures in the stories during what you might call a "fateful encounter".

Below are the thumbnails that I've done for the eight tales.

Next up - rough sketches!

Shaking off the cobwebs

Hello! *listens for echoes*

It's unfortunate. I've hardly posted anything for the entirety of 2013 thus far. Sad, sad, sad... Truth is, I've been so busy trying to hold down my current illustration gig that for a while it was all I could do to hang in there with it, let alone making personal art on the side.

Which brings me to the good news: I'm beginning to make more personal art on the side.

I signed up recently to take a Lamp Post Guild course by Cory Godbey concerning personal projects. It's a 10 week class that focuses on creating sustainable personal projects. So over the next few weeks, I plan on posting some of my progress here. Doing the work will be my first priority, so while I'll try to post things up here regularly, I'm making no promises on how often or how much I'll post. I know myself too well for that. :)

In an effort to get in the groove of creating personal pieces, here's something I worked up over the past couple days. 

Website Mascot Design

I was recently commissioned to design a character to be the mascot for a website business. The idea was to use the character to visually represent five different pages on the site: Contact/How to Find Us, Security/Log In, What to Bring, Greeting/Intro, and Sign Up.

We began developing the character with several different sketches, narrowing it down to three options, and then chose one to use for the final illustrations. The goal for the mascot was to have him be something of a nerd (but cool at the same time), 20-something years old, and dressed casually. Some initial sketches below:

Two of the contestants who moved on to the 2nd round:

The final illustrations:

Bonus! A bit of the process below as a nifty animated GIF. :)

 

Funny Phobias Animation

Ahem!

I would formally like to present to you my first stab at traditional animation!

It's running only at 15 fps - largely because the project was a fairly quick turnaround from initial sketches to final product (about 2 weeks). So for those of you keeping score at home, that's roughly around 1,000 drawings if you minus out the time text is on the screen.

Thanks again to the guys over at the creative department at Elevation!

Enjoy!


Funny Phobias from Elevation Church on Vimeo.

Graysen Green Dress

Earlier this year, I was approached by a couple named Frank and Jessica Bealer to work on their children's book "Graysen Green Dress Tries a Pink Dress" - a cute father-daughter story with a heartfelt military family slant. So for the months of May, June, and July, we worked together to hammer out the layout process and illustrations for the book, and released it July 31st!

Currently, the book is available only for the iPad and Kindle, but we're hoping to have a physical copy published sometime in the future! Below are some images from the making of the book as well as a few of the finished illustrations you'll see in the final.

An early version of the storyboard laid out.

Rough sketches to flesh out the storyboards further.

Graysen's green pajamas.

Finished drawing for the illustration below.

Shopping for the pink dress.

Graysen and her father.

I'd like to thank the Bealers for the opportunity to work on such a great story, and also to everyone else for supporting those of us who tell stories!

Again, the book is currently available in digital format on Amazon!

Vikings Love Their Mothers, Too

A little work-in-progress fun.

A Leaping Fox How-To...

Here's a little fox illustration that I created using largely pencils, Photoshop, and my Wacom tablet. Hope you find it useful!

I started off with just a sketch from reference, adding a little extra here and there. I've been using my (magic!) blue Col-erase pencils a ton lately, adding in some darker pencils on top afterwards to push the depth.

I scanned the drawing and brought it into Photoshop, where I put it in a multiply layer and lowered the opacity waaay down (to something like 18%). It may seem like I'm wasting a lot of work I did with the shading and lines, but it comes through in the end. 

On a new layer beneath it, I laid down that hot orange-red, and added a couple shades of color lighter and darker to keep it from being flat and give a general idea of the form. 

From there, on a third layer, I added some black to the ears, snout and front paws. No need to worry about staying inside the lines up to this point. (Read: You can color like a 3 year old - it'll be fun. Trust me.)

Satisfied with those layers, I created vector masks for each and defined where I wanted the edges of those colors to be.

Here, I've added another multiply layer, this time of a texture, a shade or two darker than what the fox already has. At this point, it's all about pushing the depth (like I did when adding the dark pencils on top of the blue). I also used that layer to bring out some linework that was lost a little too much when I lowered the opacity early on. (Like the ones that help define the forearms.)

And to top it all off, I added in some very slight highlights to pull it up from being too dark.

And it's finished!

A Different Approach: Forest Meeting

In an effort to beef up the composition and color use aspects of my work, I've been doing a lot of looking into how other artists build their pieces. Recently, I came across a particularly helpful ImagineFX tutorial by Gary Tonge called "Getting Composition Right" that covered both of those subjects extensively. You can download that tutorial as well as many others here. I'd highly recommend it as well as some of the others.

Here's a step-by-step process of a piece that was toying with earlier today using some of his principles and insight, trying to feel my way through a different approach to composition building.

First up is a quick thumbnail sketch for the layout of the composition. Quick, gestural lines and shapes to solely serve as a guide for the rest of the image.

Secondly, dropped a flat, dark color for my base (The green wasn't intially there. Just pretend, ok?) and lowered the opacity of the sketchy thumbnail drawing. That way, it still serves as a guide, but won't get in the way of molding the piece.

Next, I began bringing in some darks to help define the image a little more. I've seen a lot of artists that start with an even darker base color, and build the image by constantly adding light. For this image, I went with something of a medium-dark, dropping in some deeper darks...

...And then even deeper darks, as well as lights to further build definition. The source of highest contrast is strategically used towards the bottom of the composition. Every decision made in the piece should be used to compliment the focal point of the image in some way. Another aspect that I tried to employ was the play between warm and cool colors. In his tutorial, Gary Tonge mentioned that the most dynamic images will have both warm and cool colors, but the majority of the time, one of those temperatures will and should dominate the other. You'll notice some slight blues in the shadows of the trees.

And here, I began to build a little more definition into the piece, adding smaller details after laying down rough color work. Even with quick work, and without a ton of detail, the piece is shaping up nicely. Though this piece isn't for anything in particular, I'll likely continue on it.

Thanks for reading! And watch out for more to come. :)

Dinosaur-A-Day 2012 is here!

For 2012, provided our planet isn't hit by a large comet that renders our species extinct, I and a couple of other fellow illustrators will be posting home-made dinosaur drawings all year long!

Click the link below to see the full illustration of my first entry, as well as the firsts of many others!

www.dinosauraday2012.tumblr.com

The Case of the Traveling Library

Lately, I've been putting a lot of work into the area of character design. I have a fair amount of knowledge and practice under my belt, but having never taken any formal training on the subject, I figured it was high time to get on it! Given all of the insane talent out there (currently, Johnny Duddle and Peter de Seve are providing plenty of inspiration), one can't afford to sit on the sidelines with so many great resources available!

In my searching, I found three books to be extremely helpful that now go with me just about everywhere these days - they're that good.

"Creating Characters with Personality" by Tom Bancroft

This is fantastically more than just a simple how-to book on character design. It's largely geared towards characters for kids, but the underlying principles really span the entire board.

"The Mad Art of Caricature" by Tom Richmond (of MAD magazine fame)

This is an even more in-depth look at pulling the personality of a character out through the features of a person. Still working through this one - it's chock-full of great insight.

"Facial Expressions - A Visual Reference for Artists" by Mark Simon

This one is pretty straight-forward. It has an absolute TON of facial expressions from different people - young and old, guys and gals. A lot of diversity between the facial features.

All of these books are pretty cheap, so there's no excuse not to have them in your library if you're interested in character design at all!

Anybody have any other great recommendations to my ever-expanding illustration resource list?

Now to see if I can get some sort of commission for this little sales pitch... :)

Supposedly MIA for the past month

I didn't mention that I was going on a sort of hiatus. But that's where I've been. Explain? Ok.

I've been doing illustration for a little over a year now as a full-time job, largely doing work for various clients, getting to know the art community better, trying to promote myself, and developing a particular style (which Illustration Fridays have been most excellent for). But things haven't progressed quite as quickly as I thought they might - not due to laziness or by any fault of mine (as it's often been perceived by myself), but as Meagan pointed out with a statistic, that it typically takes between 5 to 10 years for an illustrator to make a name for his/herself.

...So one year down.

That said, it's looking like I'll be going back to working with the rest of the world, part time or full time, I don't know yet. With that looming possibility, I was given the advice to take about a month and really push hard on one project, though there are many that could be worked on (which is why Illustration Fridays and blog posts were pushed to the backburner for a while).

The project that I decided to work on was Munch, the children's book story that I first began developing in my last year at school. I'd never been satisfied with the rhyme scheme or a large portion of the final illustrations. So I set to work on that story, solely. The first draft of the story, which is in rhyme, took about three weeks (almost my whole month!) to complete. But to keep myself sane, I took some time out of those three weeks to work on some illustrations for the book too - the ones I knew would be kept through all of the editing. Here is the first:

The final draft of the story still isn't completed (and neither is this illustration or any of the others), but I'm okay with that. It's better to take a little more time and fill in all of the potholes, so to speak. Particularly when working with rhyme. The goal now is to keep just as resolute to finish the project even if another job takes up time.

So now I'm back, more or less, though I don't know if I'll be attempting to keep up with things like Illustration Friday as regularly as I was. But I'll still be making the illustration rounds. For instance, and I'll leave you with this, I've just put up a couple of brand new illustrations on my website for another been-in-the-works-for-a-while kid's story. You can check those out here!

Enjoy, and until next time, mi amigos.

IF: Surrender

Sometimes life puts you in situations that you can't ignore, and there's no way out of them unless you surrender. In most cases, the symbol for that is waving a white flag. In other cases, it may be a banana. For instance:

(Desperate times call for desperate measures.)

And in other news, I got some a nice little something in the mail a couple of days ago that I'm pretty excited about it:


These are some promotional mailers that I've been trying to get printed for a while now, and wasn't having much luck on the local scene. So I opted for Overnight Prints and I couldn't be happier with them. To tell the truth, I think they got the colors downright perfect. So now, I'm addressing envelopes and slapping some stamps on 'em to see about drummin' up that biznass.

IF: Dusty, version 2

I finally finished this thing. A couple days late, but finished none the less. Most of this info is in the post below, but this image is for this past week's Illustration Friday topic, "Dusty".



I'm pretty satisfied with the way it turned out in the end. It was definitely a "work with it as you go" type of project.

I'll probably go back and add some images into those blank picture frames when I get the time. I'm thinking radishes and maybe another couple veggies? Give me suggestions if ya got em. :)

IF: Dusty

It's late. But it's Friday. Which means Illustration Friday! I've been one of two things that has led to me not participating much the past couple of weeks for IF: 1) slack, or 2) busy. Perhaps a bit of both. Either way, the topic for this week is "Dusty", and here's my entry:

Get it??

At the moment, it's a work in progress and I'll probably finish this up in the next couple of days so be sure to check back! When I've finished, I'll post the current one both on here and send an update out via Twitta'.

Also, if you guys like my work and care to keep up with what I'm up to, you can follow me on Twitter or here on the blog - it'll boost my self esteem, I promise. :)

UPDATE! (2/1/11) I finally got this thing done and can now move on with my life. :)

Hot Robot Action & Singer Wedding Films

Hey guys! Just wanted to share a couple things with ya quick. First, some cool news that my buddy Mike sent to me - over at Do Your Part, who I designed a character for a while back, have put up a video with said designed character animated! Simple, but kinda neat anyway. Click the link to watch.



In other news, that same buddy who sent me that link asked me to design a logo for his new wedding and event filmmaking service, Singer Wedding Films. He's awesome at what he does, tremendously easy to work with, and on top of that, he's one of the most stand-up guys I know. So if you've got a wedding coming up (reasonably close to the Charlotte area), or know someone who does, be sure to send this link their way! (Click the logo below to go to his Vimeo page and see some of his work.)

Chickens + Snowmen does not equal SnowChickens

Sorry I haven't updated much recently. I've been trying to get all of my ducks in a row. And speaking of ducks, this week's Illustration Friday topic is "chicken".

Here's my entry:

Chicken.

And because it's been a while since I've posted any sort of update, I've decided to make this entry a double feature. A friend of mine and my wife, Austin Herring, commissioned me to do the logo image for his production company, Snow Stories Films (you can view one of the short films here, which features my beautiful wife as the lead!). This is what we came up with in the end:

Tada! Never before has a snowman had such ingenuity.

In other news, my wife is about to finish reading the Harry Potter series, so I'll finally be able to talk with her about one of the greatest stories I've ever been told. (For those of you who may roll your eyes, it's only because you haven't read it yet...)

Until next time!

Final!

Hey guys! Welp. I did it. Got my entry off to Communication Arts for their Illustration annual. I think this is the first competition I've entered into since middle school or something. And certainly the first I've paid money to enter. We'll try to improve that track record in the future...

Here's the final submission:

Many thanks to those of you who helped me critique the piece before I sent it along, including Mr. Oxendine. I should find out in a little less than two months whether or not it's been chosen, and I'll be sure to let all of you know how things went!

Cowboy

Cowboy
(Click the image to see it bigger.)

This started as just a sketch that I did some time ago, but never got around to finishing. And recently, I had some time on my hands and got the inspiration to spruce it up.

I don't think it started out as a caricature/cartoon of Sam Elliott, but it definitely became that as I went on. Which is fine with me. He's got such an iconic old cowboy look.

If you've never watched the movie Tombstone, you should do so. You'll be doing yourself a favor!

Illustration Friday - Winter

I hear that it's not going to feel much like winter come this weekend, and I've never been snowboarding. However, I have seen a rabbit before. And that's about the only thing I can relate to in this illustration, which I did for Illustration Friday's "Winter" topic.

Trying to do these IF topics once a week is wonderful workout for me. It's helped me hone my work, as well as stretched my creative legs a bit. Pop on over to IF to see some of the other entries from this week! A couple of my favorite entries that I've seen so far... Hollie Hibbert's and Nikoletta Bati's. Go check 'em out!

CommArts Update

I almost don't know quite what to do in the expanse between Christmas and New Year's. It's a bit a black hole set between two festive parties. I'm having to make myself remember that there are things that need to be done.

Like a blog post! :)

So I promised some updates on the illustration I'm working on for the Communication Arts Illustration annual, and here's a bit of the progress. The image I left you guys with was of the pencil work for the illustration, and I did some penwork on top of that to give some more definition. Lately, I've chosen to leave in the sketchy pencil lines in my illustrations, even if they're messy, because there's just something about that underlying work that I love. (Speaking of which, I saw Jim Lee's "Icons" book the other day, in which there is a ton of his sketchwork and process. Amazing stuff to look at.)

Meanwhile, here's my process, starting with scanned-in pencil and pen work.

I took it into photoshop and began laying down some flat colors, nothing too extensive. I use it as a base or foundation to work on top of.

After I got the color laid down, I started bringing in deeper colors and some texture. One of my most favorite ways to sketch is to use white and black colored pencils or charcoal on toned paper. You've already got the middle ground tones set, and all you have to do is lay down white and black sketchwork, working up your highlights and shadows. It's a bit of the same idea here, with those flat colors serving as the toned paper.

And then I worked up the highlights.

The image still isn't finished yet - I'm still tweaking things and getting into the nooks and crannies. To me, that's some of the hardest work in an illustration, because it's one of the most delicate parts of the process, as well as the part that separates the good illustrations from the great ones.

But for now? Lunch in the form of a burrito! (And not just in the form of a burrito, but made of burrito, too.)