IF Twisted

Here's my illustration for this weeks illustration Friday topic "Twisted". It's from the teen chapter book " The Silver Shuttle" By Jennifer Fell-Hayes

Entangled - IF

This weeks Illustration Friday word is "Entangled". This is a word I'm very familiar with lately as I've taken on a part time job to go with my full time illustration work and have found myself all wound up in various kinds of work.

    For my illustration work I recently moved the digital half of my studio to a part of the house with more foot traffic. Due to limited space in this new area I have my flat screen monitor hung on the wall and a swivel office chair that swivels between digital illustration mode and watching tv mode. The longer I stay in this environment the wires for headphones, wacom tablet, monitors, scanners and printers have multiplied and it has become more difficult to swivel without getting all tangled up.

   For my part time job I'm detailing cars and equally i find myself tangled in the water hose and the vacuum cord and hose while I try to wedge all 6'2" of me into a chevy impala one minute and into a cobalt the next. I can envision either of these situations making great illustrations and wish i had time to sketch them out.

     What i do already have sketched out though is a fellow who works as a veterinarian who finds himself all tangled in his work. This first sketch is the first round drawing for the vet in the book " The Little Boy With  No Name and No Birthday".

While I loved the technical aspects of the drawing and spent lots of time getting the folds and anatomy looking good, Ultimately I had to opt for a friendlier and more playful drawing.

The final art below.

IF:Teacher

This weeks Illustration friday topic is "teacher". So I've decided to post two images from a different books. The first is from "The Little Boy Without a Name and Without A Birthday"

Teh next one is from a more recent chapter book I illustrated called "Samantha Loses the Box Turtle"

Illustration Friday : Bounce

It's been a while since I've entered an illustration into the illustration friday but I had the perfect image for this weeks topic. The topic is "Bounce" so of course I had to enter this spread from my book "Allegra, Friend of All Monsters".

IF: Scary

I haven't posted on Illustration Friday for a while so I'm overdue. I'm actually working on an image at the moment that illustrates the word!!! Particularly surprising since the word is "SCARY".

I was at the local archery shop the other day and the owner asked me what I do for a living to which I replied I'm a children's book illustrator. My friend happened to mention my recent blog post about the BBQ company logo I'm working on. I then explained that I may be getting a bit of BBQ product from that client and said we should hold another cookout and say that we shot the pigs ourselves with our bows. Of  course the shop owner just happened to have a pig skull on the wall from a pig he had shot,LOL. He was a bit confused when I started showing interest in the skull as a reference for one of my current projects. HE asked, "wait, didn't you say you were a children's book illustrator?"

      The funny thing is that the pig skull actually would have been a great reference for one of my current books as I needed to design a crazy, scary looking dog. As I've done almost no work of this sort, I don't have a reference library for random animal skulls, animal muscle anatomy to exaggerate the ferociousness of the creature etc. Luckily I did have some great art website resources available to me that helped a ton. The birds in the sample above still need a lot of work but the dog has already undergone quit a transformation and still has a bit left to go.

The first one was drawn mostly from my head as an initial impression using mainly wolves as a reference.The second one actually was never intended to look like the taco bell dog but somehow references of dog skeletons, wolves, panthers, lions etc. lead to that puny little woof. The third one I feel finally hits the nail on the head.  

IF Stay

My post for this week's Illustration Friday word: STAY. This is an image I did for my first illustrated children's book "Rudy Reporting for Duty" Unfortunately the book still hasn't been published and I have no control over that. Still hoping that client will one day chose to get it published as it's still one of my favorite books I illustrated. I do kind of wish there was a way I could go back and redo  the illustrations though, now that I've had about five years to improve on my talents.

IF Launch

This week's word for Illustration Friday is Launch. I could think of nothing more appropriate than my cats favorite passtime. Two of their favorite passtimes are "Launching" and "Plopping". They will launch themselves from the cat tree and land on coffee tables five feet below. They will launch from my lap to my keyboard or from my buearu to my stomach while I'm sleeping. They seem to have this great knack for knowing the exact instant I'm just about to wake up because for some reason I always seem to wake up just moments after one of them launches themselves onto my stomach. Funny how that works. Too bad my sense of humor doesn't kick in until sometime in the afternoon.

    As for plopping, they will plop down and go to sleep on just about anything so long as it's something I happen to be working on. They love to lay down on my drawings and walk over paintings. They really seem to love sleeping on my scanner, keyboard, on my chair etc. The harder they fall and the wider they can streatch out their legs to scatter art supplies, papers, coffee, books or whatever is in reach, the louder they pur. They particularly seem to love plopping down in front of me while I'm trying to walk by them. Over the years this has made me in to something of an olympic athlete in the sport of Cat dodging.

IF-Shadows

Another Illustration friday image. This weeks word is "Shadows".  Once again I'm chosing an image from my current book I'm working on because this book is filled with shadows.  The book is "allegra Friend of Al Monsters" and will be out sometime this year. I thought about trying to shade this image or paint this one real fast to have the finished image for IF but it would have been silly for me to let IF dictate that process. Anyway, here it is!

IF "asleep"

This week's illustration friday word is "asleep". It was extremely hard for me to chose one single image to use for this because nearly every book I have ever done has the main character fall asleep somewhere in the book. Kind of makes me want to write  a book where the main characters special ability is that they never have to sleep. I have often wondered what it would be like if our bodies didn't need rest and we could just keep going for days without sleep and without feeling tiered. Anyway, for IF I chose to use a drawing from the book I am currently working on "Allegra Friend of All Monsters"

I thought it would be neat to post my other characters sleeping as well. I had no idea how many sleeping characters I actually had until doing this. These are all from different books and I may have even more I wasn't able to find.
                                                        
                                              "Samantha and the Box Turtle" Coming out this year

                                             "The Caterpillar and the Express Train" available on Amazon

"The Litlle Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday" coming out this year

         

"Spirit Driver"

"Rudy Reporting for Duty" My first Book!

"Clara and the One Eyed Sand Hog" My second Book!

IF "Lesson"

I do plan to post some other stuff eventually but for now here's another for Illustration Friday. The word this week is "Lesson".

This image is from my new book "The Little Boy Without a Name and Without a Birthday" which is due out in May and will be available on Amazon for kindle and as a paperback.  I also did a video tutorial ( or "Lesson") for this illuatration which is available on this blog and on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/user/sneezingleopard?feature=mhsn

Illustration Friday- Bicycle

My third Illustration Friday post. I found out that TONS of folks stop by the blog from Illustration Friday so now of course I'm hooked! Plus I just happen to have another preconcieved concept that goes along with this weeks word, "Bicylce".

    This was originally a very quick pencil sketch I did in a sketchbook. Not sure what brought it on as it was  a few years back. Now for this weeks IF I decided to make it a bit more of a finished ink line drawing. May color it someday if I ever find the time and may find a way to put it on some zazzle products. For the original sketch I wrote BORN TO BE WILD in some fluid large type, reminicent of John Handcock's signature. If I make this into t-shirts or something I would probably put some kind of humorous saying along those lines in there.

Illustration Friday- Journey

My second image for illustration friday. This is a previouse illustration from my book "The Caterpillar and the Express Train" in which a tiny caterpillar character goes on a long journey on a massive express train on a route between Boston and Miami.

                      more info about the book and book reading video can be found at  http://thecaterpillarandtheexpresstrain.webs.com/

Illustration Friday, "Duet"

This is my first ever Illustration friday submission! Lately I've seen artists everywhere participating in this websites weekly drawing exersize and have wanted to participate. I thought I would never have time to do so, but when I saw this weeks word "duet" I immediately had an idea come to mind and decided to stop all else and just sketch the idea to paper as fast as I could. Here's the result. I wish I had time to color it but maybe will do so later. Enjoy! (click for larger image)