Merry Christmas!

(You just know that Santa must've been quite the talker to get those reindeer on board.)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Published Book Cover!

I just received a copy of the book I designed the cover for!

It's pretty exciting and almost surreal to hold it my hands.

It was a fun project to work on and quite a privilege (Fr. Buckley has been working on it, gathering material since the late 1950s).  Even though I haven't read the book yet, I know it's going to be good and captivating since I know the author and have heard him talk innumerable times.  So if you ever want to read about Stephen Dubuisson and the reform of the American Jesuits, you can get it from the publisher:
https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780761862314

Or on Amazon for a few dollars cheaper:
http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-Larigaudelle-Dubuisson-1786-1864-American/dp/0761862315/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1386008763&sr=8-1&keywords=Stephen+Larigaudelle+Dubuisson%2C+S.J.+%281786%E2%80%931864%29+and+the+Reform+of+the+American+Jesuits

Inking In-Between Projects

Between larger projects I usually do repetitive studies like working through an anatomy book.  Recently I found that Scott Schuman has published a book of pictures from his blog The Sartorialist.  In an attempt to find some short-hand for different types of clothes as well as to increase my "fashion vocabulary" so to speak, I've started working through his book.  I first pencil in the character paying attention to the way the clothes pull and wrinkle and the way the person's hair is done.  After that I try to find only the most necessary lines to indicate the wrinkles and type of fabric and I put those down in ink.

These are the first few images I've done so far.

(Accidentally inked over her top teeth . . . and on an off-white paper I can't use white-out.)

I'm also trying to figure out how to describe faces with as few lines as possible and have the drawing not only portray the same expression but be recognizable as that person.  I was having trouble inking this guy's face and having it match the amount of detail and ink that I put in his coat.  Unfortunately, like most of these photos, the lighting is very soft and universal so there are very few deep shadows in the reference.

I'm not happy with any of those solutions, so right now I think I need to add either more detail to the coat or a stronger directional light to the whole image so that the top left version would fit.

Nora and Frogs Final!

The second-to-last stage where I added grass and the beginnings of some highlights with white acrylic.  (Again, the photo is making the colors a lot warmer than they are in real life.)

For the final image I adjusted the levels and contrast in photoshop so that what you're seeing here is just about exactly how the colors look in the real thing.  (Next time I do a progress report, I'll try to adjust the images as I go so that one can follow the color progression better.)

Final:

It looks nothing like an Edmund Dulac as I had originally intended it, but I ditched that idea after the first hour or so.  I'm finding that I like to paint things with a higher contrast than Dulac right now.  I'm really happy with the way it turned out and it was a lot of fun to paint.  It took six hours to paint plus two for the original sketch, tracing onto watercolor paper, and rubber cement set up.

Just for fun I took a picture of my (mobile) set-up:

Nora and Frogs Watercolor Part 3

Progress update:

Got color everywhere where they needs to be (unfortunately the camera didn't get the color right in this photo -- everything is a bit more purple):

Last touches before removing the glue including more details in the frogs and her face (she has an eye now!):

Glue gone and shadows in with a hint of an upper lip and some warm bounce light on the left frog's belly:

I just want to add a few more details and then it's done!

Nora and Frogs Watercolor Part 2

Progress update:

The first thing after the pencil underdrawing was to mask out around Nora and the frogs with rubber cement.  It acts like masking tape and I can just rub it off without hurting the paper or paint when I'm done!

First hour of work resulting in several layers of watercolor.  Already I can tell that this will not look anything like an Edmund Dulac painting.  But that doesn't really bother me.  I like letting the look of the painting evolve as I'm painting it.  (That's probably not an excuse for my lack of control and patience with watercolors.)

Second hour of work resulting in many more layers of paint.  I think her clothes and limbs are pretty much there along with the dark green frog on the right.  Her face needs some more work along with the tree frogs.  I figure I need about three or four more sessions (read lunch breaks) and this'll be done!

Nora and Frogs Watercolor Part 1

For some reason my daughter really loves her frog toys.  Not surprisingly, I had an idea for a painting.

I want to try to render it in the style of Edmund Dulac.  I really like his classical fairy tale painting style and I want the image to have an innocent magical quality to it.  So I'm going to try to capture some of his color schemes, the way he handles his values, and the way he alternates with hard sharp edges and very soft gradients.  But unlike Dulac, I'm going to be very sparing with the environment.  I want it to be like some of the original Whinnie the Pooh illustrations in which just enough environment is hinted at to ground the characters, and the rest is just a white expanse.  So we'll see how it goes!

This is the sketch traced onto a piece of watercolor paper.  First step is to mask the background with rubber cement.  The glue acts like masking tape and rubs right off when everything's dry.  This allows me to get a VERY sharp edge with the watercolors.

I'll keep posting updates as the painting progresses.

A Few Images from my Actual Sketchbook

These were drawn from life.  I started in pencil while the subjects were relatively still and then finished them up later.  Enjoy!

Turns out an almost dry (empty) brushpen is great for dog fur.

Finished this one with black and blue color pencils.

Used the brushpen again for this one.  Still working on getting a clean line from that.

A Short Comic (or Graphic Novel, if you will)!

I was playing "cowgirls and robbers" with my daughter a while back and a funny story ensued.  Like any normal dad I decided to make it into a comic and voila!

The instant I got the idea (well, when we were done playing) I drew up a bunch of thumbnails while the gag was still fresh in my head.

Later that day I drew some larger roughs where I planned out the pacing of the shots and the layout of the pages.

With this medium (comic books/graphic novels), you can use the fact that you have to turn a page as a pacing device for the story.  I first learned about this when reading Adam Rex's post about his picture-book process.  In fact, learning to use a new pacing device was one of the biggest motivating factors for this project.  I wanted to tell a quick story in comic-book form to learn a little about pacing in this medium and how the panels and pages affect the storytelling.  In short, I wanted to tell a story in a medium that was different than animation.

During the roughs, I realized I couldn't draw horses so I did some quick gestural sketches from photos found on Google.

I carefully measured the layout on newsprint.  I drew this up slightly smaller than the final but the important part was the ratios of the boxes and how they fit into the larger rectangle of the page.  It was also at this point that I planned out how much of the boxes would be taken up by the copy (text).

You can tell the narrative was a little different at this stage from the final comic.  I needed a better way to end it than "oh well."

Pencil on bristol board working at 9"x13" on 11"x14" paper.

Lots of reference was used.  I used photos of quarter horses, monument valley, girls barrel racing, and of course, the movie Stagecoach.  (The vista, landscape panel is an amalgamation of shots from Stagecoach which occur right before and as the Indians attack.)

Inks in progress.

(Actually, I just traced the pencil with a pen.  It's not exactly "inked."  That's why I started working on those Frazetta copies . . . to learn what inking actually means.)

Final inks scanned in.  (Have you noticed the glaring typo yet?)

I changed the final panel to have a better "punch line."

I colored it in Gimp 2.8 over the course of two weeks one hour at a time, five days a week (basically my lunch breaks).  I started by toning the whole image a yellowy-orange and on Imran's advice, I set it all at sunset and I painted the second panel (the wide vista shot) first so that I could figure out my palette.  Once that panel was done, I color picked from it for pretty much the rest of the comic.  I learned a lot from Imran on this one as he walked me through painting the vista panel and then critiqued the whole comic at various stages along the way.

I even got them printed!  (A bit more red than the original digital versions, but since it's all sunset, I didn't mind.  And now I know how different a print can be from an RGB image.)

There you have it!  The whole project from idea to finish took about a month of lunch breaks.  It was a lot of fun and now I've been bitten.  I want to make a whole comic book or graphic novel!  It's a fun medium to work in and I know I've only barely tapped the surface of the many ways you can tell a story like this.

A Cartoon and Some Inking Practice

First a cartoon I drew up about a year ago, because it's still funny.

Now, a discovery in ink!  During a slightly larger project (that I'll post soon), I found that inking a comic is an art all to itself.  (Go figure, right?)  In the interest of learning more about shadows and form, I decided to practice inking by copying from some Frazetta paintings and re-rendering them as inked characters.  I learned that cross-hatching is MUCH harder than it looks, that you really can tell the difference between a confident brush stroke and a not-so-confident one, and that drawing Frazetta characters is a lot of fun.

I did a tight underdrawing with an H pencil first and then inked them using a Pentel brush pen.  For the large, dark areas in the second one I used a Q-tip dipped in India Ink.  Works well for large areas.

Some "Traditional" Animation

I was working on an animated short that centered around an unlikely referee during a hockey game.  I was animating it frame-by-frame on my iPad using the Animation Creator app.  Unfortunately my iPad has died and it was past its warranty date.  So until I have figured out another convenient way to make hand-drawn 2D animation, this project is on hold.

Since it'll probably be some time before I get back to it, I figured I would share what I've done.  The first two videos were just tests to see how long it would take to animate and to play around with the look and shading.  I like the shading and detail in the slapshot better, but it took so long to execute that a full short at that level would take years for me.  In the interest of being able to finish a short in my spare time, I took a stab at a simpler but similar style with the referee's animation.

Enjoy!

Slapshot:

HockeySlapShot from Nathan Dunlap on Vimeo.

Referee Cycle:

Ref Test from Nathan Dunlap on Vimeo.

I spent a bit of time refining the proportions and look of the characters before I started working on the short proper.  I even made model sheets of the hockey player (they'd all look the same) and the referee.  The short starts with the ice rink empty, then a blue blur flashes across, then a red blur, then a few more red and blue blurs, then a huge wave of ice dust (you know, the kind that happens when you stop on ice skates) from either side of the screen meets in the middle and explodes into a giant cloud.  When the dust clears, you would be left with the two players in their face-off positions and then this would follow:

Opening Shot Hockey Short from Nathan Dunlap on Vimeo.

I still want to make it into a 2-4 minute short, but I need to get some better, more reliable animation equipment first.

First Book Cover!

A few months ago the former Head-Chaplain at Thomas Aquinas College (where I went to college) asked me to illustrate the cover of a book that he had just finished writing.  It's called Stephen Larigaudelle Dubuisson, S.J. (1786-1864) and the Reform of the American Jesuits.  He said he wanted a Jesuit on a white expanse running towards the insignia of the Jesuit order carrying an American flag.  This is the final image:

It was a lot of fun to do.  I drew up several small sketches of a Jesuit running in different poses and a couple different flags and showed them to Father Buckley.  He picked out the elements he liked from the different poses, and I drew up a larger version in pencil which set the values.  Then I took a picture of the pencil drawing, loaded it into my iPad and painted over it with the layers set to multiply.  After a couple minor iterations we ended up with the above image that we were both happy with.  I had some great critiques from Imran while working on both the final digital painting and the early roughs.  Thanks to him the actual drawing and painting process was a lot faster.

Preliminary sketches:

(You can see Imran's suggestion sketch in the top right.)

Value pencil drawing in progress:

The most time consuming part was working with the publishers, since they had very strict guidelines and templates that we had to work within.  But it was a great experience and one that I thoroughly enjoyed.

And my art is published on a book cover!  How cool is that?

The book is available here: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780761862321

Trying vs. Not Trying

Sometimes I find that if I don't care about the drawing or the paper I end up with something I really like.  That happened with this ink sketch copied from an ad for the new Wolverine movie.  I was super relaxed and felt more like I was doodling than drawing.  I'm pretty happy with the end result.  Maybe it turned out better because I didn't care much about the end product so I wasn't worrying about every single detail and as a result my pen lines are less feathery and cleaner than they are when I'm trying to follow a pencil under-drawing.  Or maybe I just couldn't be disappointed since I didn't care much about the end product, so when it turned out okay I was pleasantly surprised.

On the other hand, sometimes I find that working minutely and carefully, starting with one area and moving outwards one detail at a time ends up with a drawing which is EXACTLY how I wanted it turn out.  That happened with this life drawing in which the guys were not posing or even aware that I was drawing them.

I tried this method another time while waiting line at the bank.  Instead of blocking out the figure,  I drew the gesture in very lightly (so just a single line each for the spine, arm, legs, and head).  Then I started carefully drawing in the details starting with the shoulder and arm, then the back and then switching back and forth between the head and the pants.

 I'm trying to find a happy medium between these two methods where I can focus on details while at the same time skipping the pencil stage and drawing quickly with clean pen strokes.

Elnora

This is the final 4"x6" watercolor painting of my daughter Elnora.  I ended up using a white China marker to make some of the highlights stand out a bit more, and a couple color pencils for some of the darks and her eyebrows.  Unfortunately, something gets lost when the painting is scanned.  I did my best to get the colors back to the way they are in the painting itself, but it just looks different on the screen than it does in real life.

Here are the steps that the painting went through:

It was at this penultimate step that I was shown a lot of painted portraits by one of my colleagues nearly all of which had dark backgrounds.  So I decided to make the background darker to provide the contrast for her face.