A fragment of a Thunder endpaper.
Prismacolour artsticks are great to use. I’m enjoying the corners and flat sides to get sharp and gravelly effects, all rather rough and imprecise, which is a good thing when you have a tendency to over-detail things as I do, in the context of illustration work.
I did this in response to seeing some of nine year old Ricki’s skunk pictures. (see below) Some of them are very stylishly dressed. Others are pure pattern and form. Some are cartoon characters. She has covered the full spectrum of personality and style I think. Or if not, she soon will.
As my own skunks were very naked by comparison, I opened up a cabinet card portrait of a snake charming carnival performer and stole her costume for one final skunkette. She doesn’t have the lively energy of Ricki’s drawings, but that’s how it often goes… sigh.
Here are some of Ricki’s wonderful skunks via her dad’s phone.
These are some little skunky fellows sketched for somebody’s skunk-loving child. I drew these while we were watching (or in my case semi-watching) Disney’s Frozen on DVD last night.
It seems as though Disney’s latest favourite animation trick is to make all the hoofed animals into pretend dogs, tapping into all the most recognisable and well-loved behavioural characteristics of man’s most popular pet. I’m not saying this is a bad thing. The characters are fantastic. The brilliant white horse in Tangled, was really a horse-shaped hound. (Completely hilarious.) In Frozen, the minor horse character is treated in a similar way, but also the reindeer Sven. Having said that, one of his most endearing moves is to cavort through the icy danglies in the forest in a stiff-legged, pouncy, playful way and getting his antlers all tangled up. I have seen playful cattle make this same move on many occasions so that may well be a uniquely ungulate urge :-)
Do people realise fully grown cattle can be playful?
Well that was a bit of a side-track… No wonder my skunky sketches ended up being stuck in the spiral binding. I clearly had my mind on other things….
Peter, Moonlight and Greyfur, from Alan Marshall‘s classic Australian fairy tale ‘Whispering in the Wind‘.
Thinking of my puppet characters again, but also a final horse for the 52 Week illo challenge.
The mad colour theme continues this evening. It’s the last day of the school and Easter holidays proper. (Although the school has a curriculum day tomorrow so the boys will be home for one more day.)
This is another bit of playing around for the 52 Week illustration Challenge. It’s not a very serious endeavour and I didn’t try to make anything perfect. I think it’s great to have the chance to do this every now and then, because the pressure is definitely on to get the paid work perfect. (By this I mean that I pressure myself, not that author, editor or anyone else pressures me.) So this kind of play is quite enriching and definitely relaxing. Although the red version was the one I posted, I think it’s the one I like least now.
This is probably more interesting if you see the original daggy drawing (below) that I manipulated into the book covers, with an hour of twiddling in PhotoShop and then Illustrator. Although I drew this unremarkable little bird doodle, even I have trouble seeing the resemblance between the original and the resulting bird. It’s like that shameless re-making that advertisers do with fashion models.
But I do appreciate the flexibility of the software tools I have to hand, especially now that I have plenty of good paint-and-mess time at the drawing board as well. I miss it badly if I’m not getting messy in the paint.
I finished a spread for Thunder today, so it was fun to sit down this evening and splash around some watercolour paint to create a cheerful parrot (not of this world) and put him onto a book cover for the 52 Week Illustration Challenge. The theme this week is BOOK COVER. It’s a subject close to my heart, and normally I would spend longer than this on it… lovingly tweaking and twiddling each letter and feather. But a quick job is a good job until I am up-to-date in all areas. So here it is.
I don’t think I’ve got that craving for colour out of my system yet… who knows where it might lead…
Beards are back in fashion, right?
I know the background pattern could be so much better. But any drawing is done rapidly around here at the moment or not at all. Perhaps I will edit him later on. It would be easy enough, as he is coloured digitally.
I was feeling inclined towards strong, flat poster colour when I set out to colour him. In fact, the original choice was for a plain red background, which looked good, in a more serene way.
…But then I really liked the combination of manly strength, curling beard and floral pattern.
He’s originally inspired by a cabinet card photograph of a wrestler with a much more realistic beard. But this illo was done quickly for the 52 Week Illustration Challenge on the topic of DETAIL. I felt I should have a go, even though detail is really contrary to my natural habits. But it didn’t take me long to do this.
blackboard doodler – indian ink, watercolour, soft pastel
This was another sketch done the same night as the washy girls. She’s not entirely successful, but was an enjoyable experiment, and I’m finding it fun to just draw or paint whatever I please on occasion as a brief interlude between cooking dinner, organising holiday activities for the kids, catching up with overdue accounting and Illustrating Thunderstorm Dancing. I had food in the frying pan as I was painting this so I couldn’t afford to be too pernickety :-)
Dip brush, run to kitchen, stir food, run to drawing board, stir paint, drink paint water. Oops!
washy little girls
I painted these figures loosely, intending to add detail afterwards. It’s a thing that Alexis Deacon likes to do in various ways. It’s a great idea and I’ve been meaning to have another go at it. But once sketched in, I felt they were finished and didn’t want any more detail. So here they are.
Judy Watson 