Tasty

Because I think it counts as a work of art...

Chocolate cake with peanut butter frosting and chocolate glaze. Tell me that's not beautiful...

Book Project Part VII: Title page...?

Book Project Part VII:

Title page...?

The past few days have been rather busy. I spent them scanning and printing my spreads and pasting them into a working full-color dummy in order to get a better look at the book in its entirety. I also wanted to see how the pages flip, whether the book flows, and figure out what the book is missing. In the "still missing" category are a couple of interior spreads (I have the sketches but haven't yet painted them), but more importantly, I'm still missing much of the overall design of the book - the cover, the title page, text treatments, etc.

So I went back to the drawing board and spent a whole bunch of time alternately scribbling on bits of paper, crumpling them up and tossing them into the trash, starting new bits of sketches, retrieving the old ones from the trash in a semi-endless cycle.

Finally, I came up with something I thought might vaguely work for the interior title page...

Perhaps page 1...

Book Project Part VI: And There's More!

Book Project Part VI:

And There's More!

As I mentioned in my last post, there's more artwork to be seen! Woah! Much to the chagrin of the second year students, I took some time scanning a couple of new pieces for your enjoyment. I also wanted to see how the color would print before I did any tweaking or goofing with the saturation/color balance settings, so I actually printed out almost the entire book. I must say, there's nothing like holding "finished" (relatively speaking, of course) work in your hands. It felt really nice to actually flip the pages, and seeing the flow of images at 100% in color was an entirely different experience than looking at my little sketch dummy.

So all of that is to say that the book project is wrapping up well. Scanning and printing ate up the morning and much of the afternoon, and I spent the remainder of the day sketching the two spreads missing from the dummy and starting thumbnails for the title page, cover, and endpapers. Quite exciting!

But I shall prattle on no longer. Without further ado...

These spreads are nearly sequential. The first two images follow one another, but there's a missing spread between them and the third and fourth paintings.

That's all for now. I'm in the process of working on title page and cover designs. Process work, more sketches, and perhaps a few new paintings to come. Until then, have a lovely week!

Book Project Part V: Long Awaited Art

Book Project Part V:

Long Awaited Art

Halloo everyone. The semester is winding down, and I had a moment this week to set up shop at one of the scanners at the studio. It's amazing how much time scanning takes. As I mentioned, my images are all too big for our scanners - they're 30" across - so require at least two scans per image. Oy. Amazing how much time it takes. Likewise, amazing how it's possible to do a ton of work only to realize that you're going to have to do it all over again. Yep. The images you have here are fine for the web, but when it comes to the print quality for an actual hard copy... weeeell, leaves a bit to be desired. My fault, really. I didn't think to clean the glass on the scanners. All of the images thus feature delightful smudges, dynamic streaks, and an exciting smattering of dust and hair and dirt. Huzzah!

Doh.

In any case, the images are fine for sharing with all of you lovely people and fine for submitting as a rough draft for the end of the term. Over the summer, I'll rescan, format, print, and finally bind everything. Luckily and quite happily I do have the summer. The book show doesn't go up until September. (I'll post details as we get nearer to the show.)

In any case, I've spent tons and tons of time painting and have a bunch of new spreads to share.

Taking off into the city - towards the beginning of the book

Flying through the city - directly follows previous image

Field of GIANT cabbages - middle-ish spread

Back at home - at this point (I say "this point" because this could easily change in the next week... oy), but as I was saying, at the moment, this is the last image in the book

So there you have not some of my recent work. I have three more spreads that need some tweaking and a fourth that I finished today that I'll share as soon as I can get another long stint at the scanner... and this time, I'll remember to clean the glass.

Sneak preview

Hello my poor dear ignored readers. It has been a rather busy spring, and while I have quite a bit of new work, I haven't yet scanned and merged the images yet. By merge, I mean that my paintings are actually too big for the scanner, so part of my process involves scanning them in sections and then compositing them in the computer. It's not terribly difficult but is admittedly time consuming. This week I'm going to set up shop at one of the scanners in the studio and spend a day getting all of my images into the computer... at which point, I will of course share aaaall of the new work with you.

Until then, however, I have a small consolation prize. In addition to my enormous monster book project, I've been redesigning my website, doing more html whatnot, and starting to learn flash animation. Wooo! In doing all of that, I've been designing a site with embedded bits flash animations.

So for all of you lovely people, an itty bitty sneak peak of a flash animated painting.

Inspiration: Giselle Potter

I have mostly, if not exclusively, posted my own work on here. And though I've shown you process work, from thumbnails to finals to characters out of my actual sketchbook, I haven't actually mentioned anything about reference or the illustrators' work that I find helpful during my work process.

Last term, most of the work I was doing was lighter washes, pen and ink, watercolor - fairly translucent ways of working - while this term, as you've seen from the recently posted work, I switched things up and started using gouache in fairly thick, opaque layers. A friend at school saw the paintings up in my little studio and suggested I take a look at an illustrator who I was entirely unfamiliar with - Giselle Potter. Her books are all very different, but my friend suggested I look at one of her older books, "Wynken, Blynken and Nod".

The book is beautiful with loads of blues and greens and super sweet, quiet night scenes. I don't know if she uses acrylic or gouache for her paintings, but because I'm much more familiar with illustrators who work with watercolors and inks, it's been really exciting to look at another artist using opaque paint.