Still Doing Digital Illustration and Loving it!

About a month ago I finished off my first digitally illustrated book and now I'm headed into a new series of three books that are also planned to be done digitally! I have a feeling once I get enough samples to show clients the possibilities, not many will want traditional mediums. That works out great as I will still be able to have fun doing oil and watercolor paintings for my landscapes while using digital for my books and Vermoosin' stuff.

I've already posted some samples from the first book, " Brave Roger Little Mumps and Me" but here they are again finished.

And heres a series of samples from my new book. These are just rough as we are wrapping up the character design stage. The final art will be more carefully crafted.  I've heard and seen that children's book are headed in the digital direction. In fact some people are saying that there won't be many traditional illustrators left as publishers will head more in the direction of having art that moves and that can be interacted with. So it's time for me to stop being stubborn and either ge ton board or be left behind. The good thing is that I'm loving digital so far so it's been a fun ride.

Frogzilla Digital Illustration Final

After a lot of reading and a few tutorials and some road blocks i finally have my first ever full page digital illustration about 95% done!!!  It took about twenty hours but most of that was just the learning curve and trying to be extra careful so I wouldn't accidentally lose lots of progress. I'm REALLY loving how quick and simple it is to make changes to color and or value. I'm hoping having digital under my belt will make my art more appealing to publishers as i plan to begin a  more vigorous marketing campaign.

I've come a loooong way since my very first digital sketch five years ago.

First Full Page Digital Illustration

I spent the first half of the day doing my last bits of research and study on digital illustration and then finally dove in head first for the second half of the day!  I'm soooo happy with the results so far! This is my first ever  digital full page illustration. It took me over an hour just to figure out how to get the clouds painted over the blue gradient sky among a few other struggles but I can already tell how much faster this medium will be once I get things down pact. I also discovered all sorts of great keyboard commands that save an immense amount of time and will help me in my typical photoshop work. So much faster pressing a button to make brushes smaller rather than having to click the pull down menu. I'm also really enjoying the process of acquiring textures and figuring out which ones work best in the various parts of the illustration. My progress so far shown below.

Finally Going Digital!!!! . . . maybe?

Well, I've put it off long enough. I finally convinced one of my clients to let me go digital! I've committed to doing one full page illustration from my new book as a finished digital painting. Yesterday i finished up some color samples for a few of the full pagers. They are messy and the colors aren't really exactly what I want but they serve their purpose. 

If the first digital illustration doesn't come out as amazing as I'm imagining in my head I will likely end up doing the whole book in watercolor like my last six books. I feel like I have a lot riding on this. Hoping for the best!

In the past I've done various pieces of digital art but always stuff without backgrounds and without any sort of textures. This will be  a whole new experience for me as I plan to introduce textures and at this point I'm not planning to have a bold dark line. to paint inside of. I'm planning to have the line be an important element but more subdued than my past digital work. Their are many reasons I have kept from going digital before now and there are just as many reasons I've wanted to go digital. In the long run I think digital is going to make my work a ton better and will put me in better standing with the publishers. 

Little Ducky!

A quick fun digital drawing I did this morning. It's raining out and some how I let my whole morning get off track and just started sketching color onto a duck sketch I did a while back. For some reason I keep forgetting to use my stylus when drawing digitally, Keep using my mouse which I've heard reffered to as the equivelant of using a rock to draw.

Digital Children's Illustration

Last night I spent some time reading some of the blogs I follow and came across one that actually moved me to action. You know how it is to read or see something that inspires you and motivates you to actually give it a try.    The blogger who gets the credit this time is Wilson Williams Jr. Here's the post that inspired me. http://kwankwest.blogspot.com/2011/09/lion-and-mouse-process.html

Well after seeing that and leaving a comment I couldn't just leave it at that. I immediately found an illustration I had already drawn in black and white and went to work on my second ever digital painting!

Now of course I wouldn't consider this done by any means but it was getting late and I had already spent the entire day working on art, so I was just about to stop for the night. At this point I'm still not happy with the result but I can start to see where I could eventually get a pleasing end result with more work.

The hardest thing for me to get a grasp on with digital art is how to chose good colors. Traditional mediums for me seem to lend themsleves more easily to harmonious color combinations. It's just a matter of reading a few tutorials and learnign to use color palettes and such, I'm sure.

Then I had another burst of inspiration and went to town on a small cropped section of the painting to get in a bit more detail and color.

Another artist whom i have mentioned many times before is Dani Jones, as she's done a lot to inspire me in the world of digital art. she got me interested enough to try out my first digital painting below. I suppose for now I will keep trying to squeeze in some of these practice paintings on the side and eventually i will feel comfotable enough with the medium to use it on some final artwork.

Final Monster Children's Book Cover

A couple of previous posts about how I designed the cover for my new book "Allegra Friend of All Monsters"
Thumbnails and Ideas for Cover

color and cover design

Now this is the final post for this book cover design. In the first two posts I showed how I start with rough thumbnail sketches and talked a bit about my understanding of what makes a good cover design. I then showed the final drawing, color sample and a bit of the various design ideas for the background of the cover surounding the actual illustration, with a bit of experimentation with the fonts and text placement.
To that point the client and I agreed that number nine was the best option.

     In this final step the graphic designer tried a bunch of different fonts and we decided on the ones below. I also did some work in photoshop to make some minor but important adjustments. First I had to cut out around the treasure chest on the back cover to get rid of the pinkish background color and create a new shadow to better fit the cover color.

While seeing the text laid out, I  realized I cropped a  bit too close on the illustration and didn't leave enough room for the text to fit comfortably. The cover needs to have room left for the bleed area which will be cropped off in printing. SO I went back into the original files and adjusted that. Now you can see a bit more of the book shelf, mirror and rug.

Then I realized the rubber ducky on the front cover was in the way of the text so I eventually moved that in photoshop and patched up the spot it was orginally.

Now all that's left is to move the names up a bit at the bottom so they won't be cropped off in printing and we have our final cover!

Dinosaurs in outer Space Background

An updated sketch juxtaposed over some reference photos for the background and a bit of photoshop mixed in. This is roughly how the client wants the background to look and will help me in working out the final Illustration.

Illustration Process

Today I finished another quick illustration for an online contest. This particular contest was a challenge for three main reasons. 1) I only had three partial days to design, create final sketch and then fully render final version. 2) I intended to use my new one month trial adobe illustrator and my new wacomb tablet to create the final vector art. I’ve never made a vector based illustration before, and I had only used adobe illustrator a couple of times to lay in some text on images, and I’ve only drawn with the wacomb tablet twice before. 3) The contest rules only allow for six colors including black and white and tints and tones of colors. I have never worked under color restrictions before and definitely not while working with a new medium. I gave myself this challenge because I need to learn the computer programs and I figure I may as well have a chance to win some income while practicing these new skills. You can see the finished version to the right. Please read on to see my process and thoughts as I designed and created this unique illustration. Then please go to http://www.greeneyed.com/contest_page.php?contest=1&entry=45 to vote on my design.
In brief. the contest is put on by a company called “Green Eyed Monster” and they are promoting a healthy environment. My task was to design a bag that would display this message visually and appeal to the common person.
Any good illustration has to start with lots of planning and sketching of ideas. Unfortunately I didn’t have time to let my thoughts simmer day after day until I had developed a brilliant stew. Instead I ended up relying heavily on my previous illustrations to fill in the gaps. As seen below, I started with very basic concept sketch for a green eyed monster. I actually was thinking about skipping the contest all together because I found out about it too late. While watching a commercial I thought of the idea to have a green monster with one eye and there would be a globe with the continents where his eyeball should be.

This then developed into sketch two, a quick sketch of the monster sitting on the earth picking at the garbage and eating it. Sort of like cats scratch at fleas.
Sketch three builds off an idea I used in a poster design for a masspirg earth day event. The idea here is that the monster is floating next to the earth and he is using a vacuum to suck up the garbage from the earth. At this point I decided to look up the phrase “green Eyed Monster” to see what sort of things might inspire my drawing. I use this technique when I start to run into walls with the sketches and need more reference. To my surprise I found this guy who was almost an exact replica of the monster I just designed. Yikes, back to the drawing board as they say.
I like to keep my old paintings hanging in my studio to keep me motivated and remind me what finished products look like. I looked up and noticed how my honey pot ant painting resembled the vacuum bag on the monsters back. This gave me the idea to create a monster that would mimic honey pot ants, only this monster would gobble up and store garbage in his abdomen instead of honey. The last few sketches show the development of that character. You will also notice I had another ant painting depicting a specid wasp and this inspired the idea to add wings to the creature.

Once the character was more or less designed I went ahead and worked out which continent layout felt best and moved the stream of garbage around a bit. I now have an elephant nose sucking the garbage up. This of course comes from another sketch I have hanging in my studio.

Now that I had the monster and his environment figured out I needed to figure out how to use Adobe illustrator to create vector art. I actually know the basic concept behind vector art because I took a digital illustration class three years ago. Unfortunately I ended up taking the digital illustration for animators class rather than the one for illustrators. So we spent the whole semester working with other programs and one day talking about illustrator. I basically spent a couple of hours trying to figure this out and realized I was trying to do the impossible in a short period of time. I ended up settling for an inked outline done in Adobe illustrator which I then brought into Photoshop where I did the color. Below you can see the difference between a magnified version of a vector (illustrator) drawing versus my original pencil drawing and pen drawing and the raster (Photoshop) image.Generally I will also do tons of color samples to determine the mood and overall feel of a piece. However I had pretty good idea of what I wanted for this image due to the theme and localized colors of objects. I wanted a green earth with black garbage, blue water, and a green monster. The yinyang pattern just sort of emerged from the sketches so I went with it. I also considered having an apple stem and leaves sticking out of the top of the earth but felt it was a bit much.
And now the final again.

More Digital Art

I had the opportunity to put some final touches on another digital sketch today so I figured I would post it. This is now my second digital sketch with my new (and first) wacomb tablet. I spent about two hours on this which is a lot less time than it would probably take with oil paint. Of course I wouldn't consider this finished either. I chose this image of an elderly gentlemen to further my knowledge on the differences between youth and aged people. I found this guy to be a good match for my meager skills with digital art since the sketchy and sharp edges of the medium in its raw state actually add to his aged look. For children I would have to blend the colors and edges far more.

Matty goes Digital!

Many of you who know me and my art making process know that I'm not very interested in making digital art. However I have seen a huge surge in this form of art in the last few years and realize it's importance in today's illustration marketplace. In recognition of the benefits and necessity of digital art, I have decided to give it a shot. The skull to the right is my very first quick sketch done with a wacom tablet in adobe photoshop. It's just an attempt to get a feel for using the tablet. I plan to work with the tablet until I get as confident with it as I am with a pencil. This will enable me to work faster and cheaper and hopefully broaden my field of employment. I've been playing around with google sketchup, Inkscape and have worked with adobe photohsop for about four years now. I plan to study some tutorials on adobe illustrator, indesign and other common programs used in the illustration field. Many job listings don't even want to see traditional art unless the artist is also capable of working with these common programs.