Illustration Friday: Egg!

This week's topic at Illustration Friday is EGG.

Below is the image I submitted to http://illustrationfriday.com.
It's a fun site and I find it to be a great way to exercise creative thinking and honing up my drawing skills. I highly suggest all to join (or at least take a look at the other great submissions made by all the fantastic artists there.)

Images from da Ol' Creaky Hard Drive: Bobby

Digital watercolor base with color pencil lines (Painter 12)

I have an old, external hard drive that sounds like it is on its last leg. I can hear the ball bearings starting to rattle inside the casing . . . so, I've been backing everything that's worth saving onto another drive.

What's strange is finding images on the drive that I don't remember making . . . ( I do find this happening more often as I get older.)  I'm pretty sure I did these images . . .
yea . . . pretty sure . . .

This image is one of those test sketches I was doing last year when I was making my children's book. I do remember making quite a few test sketches, trying different styles and looks -- but time was the key back then. To do the entire book in a more painterly style would have easily added another month to the workload.

I really wanted a sketchier style to the book, but I was concerned on how to control the pencil line details.  Transferring pencil lines to print is tricky and risky; it's very easy to lose many pencil strokes when scanning into a computer.  Since this was to be my first major self published book . . . I wanted no risks taken. The final decision was to go with heavy ink lines and spot coloring, making it a very cartoony-looking style.

Daily Quick Sketch: Beached Whale (Updated)

Quick little sketch made for the website Illustration Friday, a site where people upload their artwork based on the topic of the week. This week's topic was: SWIM.

Beached Whale colored in ArtRage

UPDATE: Added the original pencil sketch seen below.

Original pencil sketch. Note the nose clip looked too much like a mustache

Publisher's Weekly Review! (Updated)

Just found out today that my first children's book, Bobby's Biggest Bubble, was selected and reviewed by Publisher's Weekly and printed in their bi-monthly magazine for independent publishers called PW Select. Too exciting!

Cover to the PW Select Feb 2013 Magazine

Above: clipping of the book review from PW Select magazine

Update:

Adding direct link to the review on PW's website:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-9857628-0-3

Daily Quick Sketch: Balding Eagle (Updated)

Daily sketches are quickly drawn sketches that come to mind on paper with no rhyme or reason. They generally are just flashes of images imagined.  It is through this process that hopefully something good comes to light.

But sometimes . . . something appears on the paper which just seems so weird, bizarre and unexplainable . . . yet it makes me laugh (and I may be the only one laughing.)
This is one example:

Original B&W ink quick sketch

UPDATE: added color version

Character Development: Using What Worked in the Past

For a long time, I've needed to develop a witch character for my upcoming eBook, "Bladimir Blarfarg and the Worm Wire Glasses". Making a good cartoon witch character isn't easy, especially when its a story for children.

The character of Witch Nazel needs to be a kind, helpful and happy witch. She is a crucial character to the story so she can't be too ugly because children would hate her. She shouldn't be too cute and pretty - that would make her more of a fairy then witch.  And since I always want to write humorous stories that make children laugh, she MUST be funny. Knowing these features I needed for the character, I still struggled to put it all together and get the right look.

One of my many Witch sketches: This one was too thin and lanky to use.

I noticed I was making my witch sketches too thin and tall. Thinking how Witch Nazel would interact with Bladimir, (who's a short stocky monster), I realized the layout needed to be more compact. Most picture book eBooks are read horizontally then vertically. So I needed short, stocky and funny . . . that's when I remembered an old favorite character of mine: Chef Gordon Baloo.

The transformation of creating Witch Nazel from key features of an old favorite, Chef Gordon Baloo.

Chef Gordon Baloo was a character I created long ago. I have always loved the look of this character and have made cartoons, animation clips and one of my old website's used him as a company mascot. So the answer was easy, take Chef Baloo's best features and dress him up as a witch.

Witch Nazel was born . . .

Design Process: SCBWI contest

Below is the entry image I sent to SCBWI (Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators), which is one of the largest existing organizations for writers and illustrators of children's books.

Final illustration submitted to the SCNBWI contest

I became a member of SCBWI last December and was sent an email about an illustration contest for New Jersey members. The rules were: 5" by 5" black & white image with one color showing a kite (which is the group's key logo element.) It was also suggested to not get too detailed since the image would print small . . . (but this was a concept I thought of when I first heard of the contest. Couldn't help myself!)
Below, I will show my process for developing this concept, how I technically do projects like this, and the changes that occurred along the way.

1. The Concept Sketch (Getting It on Paper)
The first thing I do is quickly doodle what I'm thinking. The image doesn't need to be clean, neat or even recognizable -- at this point, I just want to get the image in my head down on paper.

First pencil sketch of the initial concept

2. The Main Focus
The concept here was to have many characters of different genres coming out of a giant book and looking up at a kite. Since the kite represents the SCBWI group, it should be the main focus of every character. The most prominent character was going to be the book. It is important that the book be the "leader" whose eyes make you, the viewer, look up to the kite. Knowing this, I created huge glasses to exaggerate the book's eyes . . .

3. Fine-Tuning the Characters
Now that I know the characters I want to place in the image, I focused on each one as an individual. This way I don't have to worry about the layout or composition of the image. I can just make sure that each character is clearly seen, understood, and detailed to represent different genres in children's books.

Original ink sketches of characters for the image

4. Putting the Puzzle Together

Now that I have all the pieces needed -- I start to re-arrange, re-size and change the characters trying to give each one their proper spacing so as not to crowd too much in one area of the image. This is where it all starts to come together. You'll notice the changes being made: like the monster in the book, deleted one of the flowers in the lower corner, and the princess (who just wasn't princess-y enough.)

The basic layout for the final image

5. Going Vector
I bring the image into a vector program. {CorelDraw X6 was used in this case.} The image needs to print in black and white . . . so there can be no grey (like a pencil sketch) because details would fade/smudge in print. Creating the work in a vector program will give a bold, clean look.

One should keep in mind that doing vector images can something feel too mechanical and cold. So to create more of a natural pen flow, I constantly altered the thickness of the pen lines to give a more freehand style to the image.

The entire concept image is being recreated in vector format

The concept sketch is laid and locked on the bottom (or base) layer. It is then toned down to a faded/ghosted image which makes it easier to redraw over. To make it easier to arrange and control, each character/element is created on a separate layer. You'll notice above, I don't bother to create the eye focus on the kite yet; Since items and the kite itself are being moved around, it's best to change the eye focus when everything is in place.

6. Final Tweaking
Once each of the characters is re-drawn in vector lines, many things were re-sized, altered, and shifted to create a more balanced spacing. Then, all the characters' eyes were fixed to focus on the kite.

Revised simplified Gray image sans the Elf

Greeting Card Market

Before making a career in toy design, I tried my hand at many things: comic strips, magazine cartoons, children's books and greeting cards. Submitting to Greeting Card companies was just as difficult as submitting to the children's book publishers. (Maybe even harder, since many greeting card companies started to hire in-house artists - which meant you needed to live reasonably nearby the company.) It also wasn't a great paying job.  You didn't get to keep your work, the company had full ownership and you would have to constantly churn out new materials daily to stay competitive. I knew all of this, but still decided to give it a try.

Below is one of the few card designs I still have on record, mostly because it is was a favorite of mine. Seeing it now, it really doesn't work for the general public's sense of humor, especially for Christmas. But I still think it's a great funny card (. . . for those with a warped sense of humor.)

Bobby's Biggest Bubble: The Doggie Story

Those who have read my first children's book, Bobby's Biggest Bubble, should already know that I put a little secondary story inside the book. The two dogs in the book, Woger and Oggy are having their own little adventure as Bobby's story is told. Woger is the bigger dog whose constantly watching his mischievous little pal, Oggy.

Seen here is Bobby's dog Woger (left) and Otter's dog, Oggy (right) having their own little adventure.

I knew I wanted supporting characters in the story, but I didn't want a lot of dialogue. So what better then to use two cute dogs following the boys in the adventure. The dogs don't need to talk. Kids love animals. Win, Win.

Then it occurred to me, these dogs could have their own tiny adventure in the background.

As Bobby's is creating his biggest bubblegum bubble -- Oggy starts chewing on a few spare gumballs and creates his own bubble. The major difference? Little Oggy starts to float away with his bubble.

Woger, the ever faithful pup, is always seen watching Oggy as he floats away higher and higher. But by the story's ending, something happens and it all comes around full circle. Oggy is seen safely back down on earth, (though stuck up in a tree.)

It was surprising to find that many children saw this secondary story immediately. I thought it might be something they would find on the 3rd or 4th reading. But many parents tell me that their children loved seeing Oggy floating in the background. Children like to search for Oggy before the page is read to them.

Roger and Oggy will return along with Bobby and Otter in the book's sequel: Bobby's Ginormous Jelly set for release by Fall 2013.

The Importance of the Re-Write!: Intro

RE: Bobby's Biggest Bubble and its Re-Writes
Before finally printing my first book last year, I gathered all the past information and images I could find. Some things were lost due to a broken hard drive or merely misplacing a file or two. But most of the material was archived on several backup drives.

Somethings didn't change that much at all. The original cover from the B+W dummy book .

Since the book's first version was made nearly 19 years ago, the story itself has gone through quite a few major revisions over the years. I found one of the original dummy books that I tried to get published nearly a decade ago (this, in particular, was made during my second attempt of breaking into the publishing business.) All of the following images for this posting will be from this black & white mock-up book.

Just to Note: It's safe to say that I HATE seeing my old work. I see so many poor decisions in the storytelling from looking at these old alternative versions of Bobby's Biggest Bubble. The main elements are all there: the gumballs, the big bubble, the meteor and of course Bobby. But much of the story's flow and structure has been tweaked.

So . . . I'm going to share some of these alternative versions of the book here in 3 parts this week. Think of it as one of those DVD extras where the clips that were edited out.
These postings will assume many have read the story - and if you haven't, there will be spoilers (so don't spoil it for the children!)

Part One will be about the arrival of the gumballs and the neighborhood children.

Part Two will look at Otter and how the bubble was originally going to get around town.

Part Three will show the not so great original rushed ending. (sigh)

You know, I'm starting to think I shouldn't show this stuff. But hopefully, in doing so, others can see how important rewriting a story really is when trying to craft a better story.