Portfolio Piece #1

I love drawing. This was so much fun to work on that its all I can do to not keep making images illustrating the "story".

Illustration #2

Well, I've been dragging my feet on this one. I foolishly let myself paint the meatloaf early on (the part I was most excited about) and ended up having a hard time motivating myself to finish the whole piece. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with it. It feels nice to be painting again. Dusting off the cobwebs on my watercolor abilities is both fun and frustrating.

The main reason I finished this morning is that I'm super excited with how my future Jack in the Beanstalk image is coming along. I still have a lot of drawing to finish, but I am pretty sure its going to be a blast to paint.

portfolio development

Per the advice of my agent, I'm going to be making a few portfolio pieces to show off to prospective art directors and editors. I asked Kelly if I should just pick some random scenes from some fairy tales and illustrate them (while showcasing my ability to draw kids, babies, hands, and talking animals), she said yes, but suggested that I don't make them all look "classic", and that I should make them in different genres (modern, futuristic, etc).

SO, I started sketching some ideas for Jack the Robot Killer (sounds too aggressive, I know), or Rocket Jack and the Beanstalk, or something like that. Pretty much I doodled this character design and decided to make a futuristic jack and the beanstalk. The giant is going to be a huge steam punk robot, obviously, but I'm not sure what the future golden goose would be.

Any ideas? Whoever suggests something cool that I use gets a present!

Revision

Here's the final drawing for the second painting, magic works on meatloaf too. My wife pointed out that kids don't do the dainty "pinch your nose in disgust" pose, so I reworked the character to have a more natural gross out pose.

Hair pulling, and meat loaf

I've been pulling my hair out (by pulling my hair out, I mean taking the dog for a walk, deciding what new DS game to buy, and watching "the watchmen"...obviously) all day today trying to get my picture book character consistent for the second painting I'm going to do. It wasn't until I scanned the thing in to work on composition and placement on the page that I think I figured it out! Her arms are too lanky and her hands are too big...and there is probably something wrong with her eye. BUT, I am awfully fond of my depiction of Meat Loaf (the loaf, not the singer). Not that I have anything against meat loaf, mind you. I love foods in loaf form (bread, cheese, meat, etc), but it does conjure up unpleasant images when combine "meat" and "loaf". I ran the drawing by my wife to make sure it wasn't too gross for a picture book, kids love gross... right?



One of the things that I find helpful is a comic book trick, where you change your drawing to blue tones in Photoshop, print it out, ink it, scan it back in and remove the blue tones. Editing stuff tends to be a pain but it is essential to getting a good image, or good writing (not that I write, but I've heard there are these people who specialize in editing written things). In order to keep my momentum, tricks like the blue line thing are invaluable time savers. Below you can see what I'm talking about, my old drawing is in blues, and then I re-drew some new arms in pencil. I'll do this a couple of times till I get it right. I think in the old days people used tracing paper, but who owns tracing paper anymore? Normally I can just fix this on my original piece of paper with a good ol' fashioned eraser, but I've drawn and re-drawn this thing so much that my paper is getting unusable.

Painted

Here's the children's illustration painted. Not quite sure about the magic beam....may fuss with it in photoshop (more than I already have).

Officiallness

Just something that made me happy today. The Andrea Brown Literary Agency just added me to their section of artists represented. Seeing my name on their site really made it seem real: I have an agent and I am making some headway towards my art career.

If you're so inclined (though I'm pretty sure only my mom is) here is the link:

http://www.andreabrownlit.com/websites.php

I'm about halfway down.