Galumphers and one magpie
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Category Archives: birds
Doodle Galumphers at the Swimming Pool
I’m not sure why my book projects seem to happen at the swimming pool. Pippa who modelled for Thunderstorm Dancing was at the pool, and many of the sketches I did at the pool while the boys were having swimming lessons fed into the book.
Here are some from that time, that have been posted before.
Today I took the boys to the pool because it was pelting rain and they were stuck indoors. And there I happily began doodling for Leonard Doesn’t Dance, my new picture book project for HarperCollins, written by Frances Watts.
In truth, I set out to re-read the manuscript and ponder layouts, but I got as far as the first two lines and found I had to turn over the paper and doodle birds on the back. I think it was because Leonard was groaning. ‘Groaning’ is a very suggestive word. It conjures all sorts of pained expressions, and it wouldn’t wait.
The first bird at the top is about to groan. Or has just groaned. He may have been groaning for some time. But after this, the others became more cheerful. I’m not worrying about style at the moment. Just going for Galumphing. That is my brief. It’s a brief brief.
It’s not hard to see the inspiration for these particular Galumphers.
Rose in the foreground… just in case the camera is edible.
Lily looking for something to trip over
Here are Rose and Lily, the Terrible Pteranodon Twins (Araucanas) and Lily in particular, is the most impossibly clumsy bird you could ever meet. If you were to put a champagne glass in the middle of a football field and let Lily go and graze in that field, the first thing she would do would be to trip over the glass and spill the champagne. Here she looks like she is marching, but she is really galumphing.
My Leonard bird will, I hope, not be any species of bird in the real world. There will be plenty of those in the book, but Leonard I think may dispense with such restrictions.
In the next drawings I started to exaggerate the trousers on the bird, a thing that I’ve done before with my blob birds. It occurs to me now that if we choose to make Leonard a young bird person, his trousers might be shorts. These three fellows seem to be older bird persons.
Here is a younger bird person wearing short trousers. And that is not a codpiece. (The bird tails might be tricky in some instances…)
And this drawing raises the question of whether Leonard ought to be more of a Bird Person, or a Person Bird. He will have to fly at one point, but he prefers cupcakes to cockroaches. He’s a multi-layered Bird Person. I’m sure there will be many more bird doodles in the coming weeks.
By the way, my advance copy of Thunderstorm Dancing arrived on my doorstep while we were at the pool. How appropriate, given that the rain had been bucketing down all day. We have all been looking through it with pleasure this evening. It is a very advance copy though. The book won’t be in the shops until April, I believe.
A Thundery book in the cloudy evening light.
Leonard Doesn’t Dance and Trudy loves Dodds.
I’m excited to have two new projects to work on over the summer. One is another picture book with Frances Watts called Leonard Doesn’t Dance. The other is the beginnings of my own picture book with the working title Trudy and Dodds.
I’ll be posting here about both of them as I go along. Leonard will be about birds… something I shouldn’t have too much trouble loving! I’ve posted a couple of very early ideas about Leonard already. And you can follow the images alone if you want on my Pinterest page here. The more wordy stuff will be on my blog. (…rambling, rambling…)
Trudy and Dodds was a concept I had just come up with at the time I was offered Thunderstorm Dancing and to my surprise, I received a grant from the Australia Council to get the project started. But I found I could only focus on the one big (Thunder) project, and so Trudy and Dodds was put on hold. Now is the time to revisit it, and I’m really excited to be booked into a masterclass in mid February with editing maestros Jane Godwin (Penguin) and Erica Wagner (Allen & Unwin) along with book design maestro Sandra Nobes. I’ll be taking my dummy book and manuscript along to that masterclass as a part of my grant project to get some feedback and help.
So, in the meantime, on with birds and…. dog-monster-thingees. Probably.
Pecking Order
I’m feeling rather exhausted this evening. So I drew our chickens to give myself a lift. I started the beginnings of a pecking order diagram. I’m quite fascinated by how this might be done, because the order is not linear in any clear sense. Below is the Official Order. But there are weird aberrations in the middle where certain chickens are scared of other chickens. And there’s one vicious triangle… Hmmm.
Those two devilish looking youngsters at the bottom will grow larger than all the rest. I have therefore introduced them to the flock as babies so that their elders can keep them in their place before they grow unwieldy in size. (According to what I have read, pecking orders rarely change once established… unless the circumstances are unusual and special and particularly particular…)
But according to what I have read, pecking orders follow a simple linear hierarchy.
In my experience this is not the case.
On a secondary note, I’m sure you will be pleased to know that I have now had all my chickens expertly colour analysed by an image consultant. So they will never, NEVER be seen looking anything but their best when they go out to parties. I can vouch for this without a doubt.
Vita, surprisingly, is a summer. But we did not establish which kind of summer. This is because, as Annabel pointed out, the rules of colour may be different for chickens! Well that’s awkward! Now we’ll have to write a book about it!
Hilda is a deep winter, Poppy is a warm autumn, Stella is a deep autumn, Storm is a soft summer and so is Nora. The Terrible Pteranodon Twins are cool winters. Their legs are green and so will be their eggs one day.
endpapers instead of Endpapers
I’m working flat out to finish Thunderstorm Dancing before the end of the month, so I haven’t much time to post here. Nor is there much to post, because the illos for the book are under wraps until publication… apart from small snippets.
Yesterday I finished the endpapers for the back of the book. Today I’ll hopefully finish the front endpapers. I suppose it could be okay to post a bit of an endpaper on Endpapers.
Here’s part of the back endpapers.
Cornish Cat called Thunder with seagulls and afternoon tea
And here’s my very hurried 52 Week Illustration Challenge contribution for this week (Under the Sea) which I made with some leftover fish bones drawn for Thunder endpapers. I’m sure leftover fish bones are an under-utilised art material…
This didn’t really work, because I was hurrying so much. Having said that, the imperfect, rough edges on everything are deliberate. I like the rough prickliness of the pasted fish and seaweed drawings, which gives them a fossilised or desiccated look.
Halloween Under the Sea
Both of these works are made using drawings done with Prismacolour Artstick, scanned and coloured in PhotoShop, on top of watercolour and ink background washes.
Oh, and lastly, just this little fragment from one of my illustrations for the book. (The lightning page.) I love the close-up sections of some pages, with none of the action or figures present, making them abstract. This one reminds me of the skin of a whale swimming deep underwater. I feel I should paint a whale eye and put it in one corner. Perhaps later, when all is done.
Thunder lightning sky fragment
The Paunch on the Perch
Mr Owl (as yet un-named) progresses on this sunny spring afternoon, our last day in Camperdown.
Our lack of method is throwing up a few issues that will need to be addressed and at the moment the head looks too tall. But when he’s a little less soggy, we will be able to remedy that.
Mr Owl hanging from the clothes line, with some serious surgery about to begin. Some wire (which I could not get to go through his paper middle – not surprisingly) is tied around him to form the basis of his wings.
My apprentice poses with Mr Owl, newly attached to his perch. Arty did one leg, I did the other.
The mad professor at work. Thanks to Arthur for many of these photos. As you can see I had sticky fingers!
The wings and tail in progress, photo c/o Arty. You see I ran out of wire for the second wing. Not to be too daunted, we carry on. Mr Owl will never be the best flier, which reminds me of the wonderful Sett Owl from Isobelle Carmody’s Little Fur series.
Gluey! Shortly after this, the dog threw up on the lawn next to me. You wanted to know that, didn’t you?
Arty is working on making several beaks for us to choose from, when the moment arrives for Mr Owl’s face!
I hope you are enjoying all these photos of the washing (sorry Nanna Gail). Where would we Australian’s be without the marvellous ‘Hills Hoist’ clothes line?
And now we leave him to drip dry for a while. Tomorrow he needs to be fit to travel to Melbourne in the car.
And now it’s back to work on Thunderstorm Dancing cover options in Nanna Gail’s sunny studio.
Week 39 WORDS
This week’s theme in the 52 Week Illustration Challenge first spawned a parliament of owls.
my first owl drawing and the one I don’t like. Yick!
I like this one, even though he is rather serious. His O needs kerning.
I like this rough, painterly owl. The lettering is awful. Just a bit TOO careless.
This doodle didn’t even get any words added
It was getting late, but then I just had to do this dog and he was very quick.
Yappy the Dog
Finally, I went to bed. But I wasn’t finished with doodling, so I took my pen and a bit of paper. Total inanity prevailed.
First Yappy the Dog got water tortured by Amy the Toddler
Then following on the theme of Gnawty dogs… (oh dear)
And noisy dogs
And noisy parrots… and naughty cats…
And a few more owls to finish up. Whew!
Sewjourn (part 2) – Bird Mania
I doodled, sketched, painted and chopped many birds at Sewjourn. Here are a few.
The jacket was time consuming and almost took one full day in the studio (bearing in mind that the culinary arts are also a big part of our Sewjourn weekend, so there is a fairly lengthy lunch-break in the middle of the day).
Choosing projects is a big decision when the time is limited to 2 precious days. A big project can be satisfying but takes a big slab of the time. Doing many small projects is also very satisfying. The important thing for me is to make some decision, because staring in confusion at a list of projects is not at all satisfying!
The Doodle Birds were a quick little play and very small, but I also had a lovely time preparing for them, by embellishing book pages with a range of inks and paints to make the patterns for their plumage.
Apologies for the poor photographs. I was so focused on creating that I didn’t take the time to set up proper photos, and much was not photographed at all. In fact I didn’t even make it to the wonderful book shop on the Lancefield main street, and I usually love to support them and buy a few treats for myself or others while I am there.
Bird collage doodle
Bird collage doodles canoodle
A white jacket I have been meaning to paint or deface in some way for over two years. Now well on its way with a back panel full of painted birds
My favourite jacket bird. I like the simplicity of outline, form and colour.
Another little collage bird. Actually the creases are not obvious in the real thing. It doesn’t like to be squished in the scanner though.
Sewjourn weekend with the Refash Sistas
This is just a quick few lines upon my return from a lovely long weekend away with my arty crafty stitchy friends at Sewjourn.
I took a veritable mountain of materials with me, as did all the others. It’s hard to predict exactly what one will feel like working on, so it’s good to have options.
As it turned out, I didn’t use my sewing machine and my space remained largely strewn with wet painting materials. But I did do a quick collaboration with Juliet; a thing I have been wanting to do for about three years.
Her thread drawings, when in their first stages, consisting of black thread on linen, often have me positively itching to take ink and a paintbrush to them! Thankfully for Juliet, I am capable of some self restraint!
Given the time and space to finally give it a whirl, I drew a few quick birds on cotton (birds were my dominant theme for the weekend) and begged her to draw over one of them in thread for me, which she did. Here’s what happened.
soft pastel on cotton
Another soft pastel bird. We carried through with only one of the three that I drew, as Juliet had her own mountain of projects to work on.
Juliet selects a bird to work on
Juliet stretches the fabric into an embroidery hoop
Juliet at the machine. An expert at work.
Thread drawing process complete
It’s not surprising that Juliet’s thread drawings resonate with me, given my fascination with continuous line drawings. These are a stitched version of that very thing.
I threw on the black paint in a variety of ways. I varied the amount of water to see how it would react to the fabric, how the spreading would look and whether I could get a dry brush effect. Unfortunately this photo is a little blurry.
I loved the way Juliet had treated the eye. It didn’t want any paint at all.
Initially I intended it to be a black and white creation. But I felt the urge to add some colour to the bird. I think this worked well.
More on my other Sewjourn projects later.
Bird Doodles during HarperCollins Author Workshop
I like to think I was being wonderfully efficient with my time last Friday afternoon at the HarperCollins Author Workshop Day. (Lordy!) After doing the blobs on the train going to the event, I doodled on with these birds during the presentations as well as taking notes!
I’m not sure I needed to take so many notes, but the doodles were a continuation of some character development for a HarperCollins picture book I will be working on over this coming summer. So that seems quite appropriate really.
The bird will sort himself out without too much trouble, because he’s kind of there in spirit already, even though his appearance does morph quite a lot. But what I’m interested in particularly is how to depict the legs, making them as versatile as possible for doing all sorts of things that birds don’t generally do in the common suburban back yard (like dancing the polka), and not getting bogged down by actual bird anatomy, whilst also not offending my own sense of birdishness by having ‘knees’ facing the wrong way or anything.
I can’t seem to help that. My dad is a vet. Sometimes I look up the skeletons of the animals I am drawing.
I do want this particular bird to have big feet if possible. There’s a reason. But I don’t want them to hamper the drawings either. So I will be playing around with options and we’ll see where we get to. In this second page, you see me having the wild idea of fat legs!
I’m not sure if this could work in moderation, or whether it might offend my aforementioned sense of birdishness…
Judy Watson 