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.