Sent off a spread this afternoon. Finishing details on another now.
Closer, closer, inch by inch.
Swinging in the rain
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Category Archives: books and reading
Still thundering on
It’s a whippet play bow.
Bow-wow.
Getting there.
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
Continuous line drawing with halftone
The theme for the 52 Week Illustration Challenge this week is ‘Black and White’. Not too much of a problem for me. Unlike last week’s theme, abstract. (aiiiiyh!!)
The boys and I went to the local hotel for a meal and took our sketch-books along. Mine was a dictionary of english phrases. I sketched the available people…. there weren’t many there! Then I scanned them, took out all the colour, and added some grey tone to give a bit of definition where my continuous line drawings were a bit ambiguous. But then I thought… black and white… not grey. So I converted all my grey to half-tone and I liked the effect. So that’s good! Trying something new with the altered books!
Chatting girl at the pub
This girl was as happy as anything and barely stopped chatting.
hoodie girl at the pub
This girl listened. And chatted a bit too.
Curly Sunglasses guy at the pub
Curly guy was a bit pensive.
Do you like my continuouslinedrawingsignaturesjustforfun?
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.
Two more balloons for Balloon Week
Train trip home from the Royal Melbourne Agricultural Show with balloon and show bags.
Overlooking the country show with a stray balloon found in the hills.
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…
Paper Dolls
I’m not sure where this paper doll process is going in an artistic context. It’s a bit like heading off for a walk with a lot on your mind, but no actual destination. Some of the thoughts that were in my mind at the time included:
• Children love dressing paper dolls. It’s fun.
• Men have been dressing women for centuries, shaping them into an art-form irresistibly pleasing to their eyes. I can see why.
• Women have also participated. Some Chinese women broke their own daughter’s feet and bound them until well into the 20th century. (How did they feel about that?) Modern woman sometimes chooses to totter on high heels (me too), making herself both physically and psychologically vulnerable.
• People have participated in a similar art-form breeding dogs (and other animals) for a particular look. Sometimes when breeding didn’t perfect the look, they trimmed off bits of the animal.
• Men and women have done the same thing with flowers and fruit trees. Sometimes we have lost some of the original flavours or genetic material altogether.
This may all sound very sombre and didactic. But really I was just playing around on the drawing board for a few minutes, and the thoughts going through my head fed into what I was doing.
I took some inspiration from Swiss fashion of the early 19th century and sketched a woman (very loosely) and began to dress her. Piece by piece.
It’s definitely fun. And as with all my hare-brained wanderings, it’s very messy.
Did she look better before or after she was clothed in bulky layers? She certainly looked different after the clothes were added.
Don’t we change ourselves so much, with what we wear?
blob tone
The natural woman
My lines have made her doll-like. I’m not sure that was deliberate. I was still in continuous line-drawing mode, so this was a big part of it.
a bit of red for a skirt
skirt and tunic added
still looking fairly natural
still a fairly timeless woman
adding the ornamentation that begins to create the look, the shape of a particular time and place
piece by piece she is decked out
ornamented
I haven’t done her shoes yet. I didn’t have any black paper. Perhaps this little bit of freedom I will leave her with. Feet on solid earth.
skirt with blood red wet crepe paper.
wet with glue, weighed down with drapery
Phew. That was fun. Now I’m going to have a shower and get into my soft stretch cotton pyjamas.
The Bird Lover (take 2)
Here’s the same subject in a very different style. I couldn’t decide on the two skirt patterns you you can make up your own minds :-)
Bella will even be able to tell me what the fabrics are called. Is my girl a soft autumn Bella? I started off going for warm autumn and then my colour palette morphed…. (obsessively drawn to soft autumn it seems)
The fashion derives from circa 1840 and the applications of partial derivatives in differential and integral calculus.
Happy Friday!
The more demure, blue skirt print.
The lighter floral print skirt echoing the snowy overlays elsewhere in the scene.
Continuous line drawings in French
The 52 Week Illustration Challenge theme this week is LINES.
These are some line drawings done in the car during a rainy soccer training session in half darkness. I am quite pleased with them because they were done from the imagination and without any visual reference. I let the words of the french lesson lead the direction of the doodle. I tried to do them almost completely using a continuous line, except where my pen fell off the page. And above, I did some rather crude scribble in the speech balloon as well.
And below is one of my Calculus Fashion ladies with a bit of colour added. I am quite liking the effect on the parchment and print. 
Sometimes I draw quite complex continuous line drawings in my mind, while lying in bed at night. It’s very relaxing, and the resulting drawings take up very little storage space.
Occasionally I forget where I put them, because I fall asleep :-)
Judy Watson 