Artsy

Almost every night for the last couple weeks I’ve been working on the new illustrations for my book. This time around (almost exactly a year later) I’m doing it completely differently.
Last year, I sat down in my studio, with pencils and paint, and sketched and painted immediately. I didn’t really plan out what I wanted it all to look like and how coherent it was going to be. Which resulted in different sized pictures (I started out using only a little bit of the page and eventually used the whole thing) but they were generally coherent in style, though, possibly ill-conceived (gotta love retrospect). The varying sizes made it really hard to format, on top of the fact that I didn’t even know what size book I was creating. If I’d thought about it a little bit more, I think it would have resulted in less headaches.
So this time, I know what size the finished version will be, I have a proof copy and I’m using that as my guide. I’m planning out where the text is going to be in the image (if it’s going to be in there) and I haven’t touched paint. yet. I’m going through every single illustration in the book that I did originally and asking myself “how can I do this better?” , “how could I make this look more interesting?” , and “how could I reinvent this scene?
So far, there are a lot more balloons, less straight up people shots, and with the scenes that have people in them, I use the other pictures with the characters as a guide to make sure that they are as coherent as possible. I’m also taking shades and varying degrees of value into account in my sketches and going over anything I want to remember the value of in levels of shading.
draft illustration
We’ll see what I think a year from now, but at the moment I’m very happy with the progress and how much I’ve learned since last October. Interestingly, I’ve been implementing a lot of what I learned in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain and that alone has been a huge difference.

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