I’m revising roughs on the run. This puddy was a Maine Coon in the rough and needed converting to Rex before inking.
It would be nice to have an auto-conversion button, but actually it’s quite a nice part of my work. The Maine Coon was a bit cranky. The Rex is more comical and sweet. So the pose/attitude needs to change accordingly.
Now for the ink.
(a Cornish Rex of course)
Work in progress (a fragment) for page 8/9 spread of Thunderstorm Dancing.
Here’s a fragment of a spread with brindly-blue whippet. (I am so into whippets at the moment. Shame my chickens wouldn’t be.)
Answer… no.
Ha ha. Oh, well. We’re getting closer…
These probably won’t be used in Thunderstorm Dancing, but some may…
A family of whispy people, including a rather chubby child, proving you can be both chubby and whispy at the same time. I note that the dictionary prefers the spelling ‘wisp’ but allows ‘whisp’. To me the ‘h’ helps enormously with the whole whispy airy thing. How can you float through the air without an ‘h’ I ask you?
And I know this because cranky Miss Lee at my Primary School was fond of explaining how to correctly pronounce ‘wh’. You should sound as though you are blowing out a candle…
causing a whisp of smoke to rise perhaps….
And these little weather fragments and waves were nice to draw and paint. This book has been an interesting adventure that has led me all kinds of places.
Here’s a section of the putto for one of the Thunderstorm Dancing spreads. He will have digital layers added and be incorporated into a spread design, but this is how he looks before all that happens to him.
Just now as I was jotting down notes for the colour scheme of Thunderstorm Dancing, I had a vision of the book being a costume.
The book covers are the dress – deep purples, greys, blues with a flash of red.
The endpapers may be startling like a red petticoat suddenly revealed
The internal pages are creamy lace and muslin with some blue embroidery, black stockings and a red ribbon here and there.
Drawing the little wench seemed the best way of jotting down my colour scheme. So here she is, a little 3 minute PhotoShop sketch (so forgive the hands and feet). If the book turns out very different, I might have to draw her a sister in a different outfit.
What a rocky road this picture book has been for me. It looks like it is coming together at last though. Here are some weather fragments to make you feel lucky to be indoors, out of the rain.
A little pick-me-up / warm-up session this morning for Tania McCartney’s 52 Week Illustration Challenge.
(funny how sometimes my post headings don’t show up… It could be just at my end. Who knows? Now that I have typed the heading into the body of the post, no doubt it will come up as a double heading. Oh well :-)Lovely to have a day off yesterday, and to spend it with Dad and the boys, (as well as Scott when he wasn’t on board his yacht admiring seals in the bay). Dad suggested we do some monotypes, and we finally got around to it in the late afternoon. It was really pleasant in the garden, and we could use the hose to easily clean off our plates without messing up the bath as I usually do at home. Boy, you should see it after a printing session!
We didn’t get too fussed about what we drew, and we were mostly messing about trying to find a paper that would take the monotype process and a bit of ink added afterwards.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of Dad’s pictures, but he probably wouldn’t have let me post them anyway!
This little dark girl was taken from a photo and was an experiment in drawing with big, angular shapes and using high contrast. It’s so tricky to draw children without the results looking sentimental, because the subject of children is so heavily laden with very strong human emotion, and many pictures of children actively seek to communicate those emotions. This drawing probably looks sentimental too, just because the child is thoughtful or pensive. She certainly wasn’t meant to look like she’d left her favourite teddy in the park. I just loved her blocky haircut and the shapes her interlocking arms made. Oh, and the reason I was drawing a child (on my day off, ha ha!) was because I decided to join in a Facebook group with a weekly illustration topic, just for fun. This week’s topic was ‘children’.
The paper was medium weight, and was fine with the monotype process, but didn’t cope with the ink wash afterwards. Buckled all over the place. Earlier, we tried with 300 gsm watercolour paper and couldn’t get an ink impression because it was too stiff. Wetting the paper didn’t work too well either, because our block printing ink is water based. (I think the ink used in intaglio printing onto wet paper is oil based. Somebody tell me if I’m wrong.)
The cat was a bit of fun for me as I suddenly had the happy thought that I could combine altered book art with monotype. Although the page was rudely removed from the book, as you can see, it did cope perfectly with the ink, and also coped rather well with the wash afterwards. Strangely, it has a fine, sparkly thing happening in the dark areas when I hold it to the light. It must be to do with the paper, as it isn’t the ink, I’m sure.
This little guy was done on very lightweight paper and the monotype line is rather delicate because there was not a heavy load of ink on the plate. I added chinese ink, Prismacolour artstick and soft pastel afterwards to give him a bit of contrast, and the original monotype line is barely there. The paper of course, buckled.
Thanks for an enjoyable afternoon, Dad!
Working hard, drawing and painting Katrina Germein’s picture book Thunderstorm Dancing. I might post some random weather fragments occasionally but can’t show you much until it’s finished…. and I’ll come out from under that cloud ;-) hopefully very soon.
Wish me luck!
Judy Watson 