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.