Illustration Friday - Safari

This week's word for the 'Illustration Friday' challenge is "Safari," a word that in previous generations would have conjured up images of the 'great white hunter,' with his big guns and a retinue of porters. Fortunately, for the most part, that sort of safari is a thing of the past. Nowadays, those who actually go on safaris, go with a camera in hand instead of a gun. I love taking pictures of animals, so I would love someday to go on a photo-shooting safari. Anyway, the idea of a photo safari made me think of a boy on a backyard safari, stalking the family cat with his camera.

In my first sketch, I had the boy peeking at the cat, who's trying to sleep, through the fronds of a potted palm. I wasn't happy with the boy's pose, he was too static. Sense I wanted to convey the idea that he was stalking the cat, I wanted more of a sense of movement. Before creating a new sketch, I did what I often do when I need inspiration or a reference for movement, I consulted one of my books on cartooning and animation. In this case I consulted the book "Animation," by Preston Blair. I've had this book for years, probably since I was in high school, a time when I had dreams of becoming an animator. It's a thin, paperback book, part of the Walter T. Foster "How to Draw" art book series that has been around for years (over 80 years, according to their website).

I've used this book many times in the past, it's a great resource for designing cartoon-style characters and learning exaggerated movements. It has a great page dedicated entirely to a 'sneak' animation cycle, (see page detail at left) which is what I used as a reference for my second sketch.

My digital pencil sketches as well as the finished piece were created using Corel Painter 11. In the final illustration, I used Painter's New Simple Water and Coarse Mop Brush watercolor brushes, as well as some of their pen brushes which I customized slightly to produce a more ragged, leaky looking line.

Illustration Friday - Winter

This week's word for the 'Illustration Friday' challenge was "Winter."  It seems an appropriate word for the wintry weather we've been having here in Indiana.  Christmas eve brought us another inch of snow on top of the six inches that were already on the ground.  The snow is beautiful, but it does make getting out and about a bit of a chore. One of those things that has become more difficult is walking the dog. Our dog, Poppy, doesn't seem to mind the snow, but for some reason, when there is snow on the ground she tends to pull harder on her leash, walk faster and zig-zag back and forth. I think the snow must somehow change the way the scents linger on the ground.  Either they're better preserved and she's getting a smell overload, or they are dampened down and she is having trouble picking up their trail.

One thing that she doesn't have trouble spotting or sniffing out are the squirrels and we have them all over our neighborhood and in the nearby park.  Whenever she sees one, she slows to a stop and stares for a moment before she slowly and stealthily begins to stalk it. If the squirrel makes a dash for a tree, then Poppy will lunge after it dragging me along with her. Because I witness this repeated on nearly every walk, I decided to do a comic scene of a dog chasing a squirrel down a snowy mountainside, only this squirrel has the advantage of being on skis.

I made several sketches before I arrived at something I was at all happy with.  I had trouble getting the squirrel the way I wanted him.  The first attempt didn't even look very squirrel like. He looked like some sort of a cat / squirrel mutant hybrid.

The next squirrel was better, but he appeared to be going to much off to the side.

Here is the final sketch that I ended up working from. The main difference is that I brought the squirrel over more toward the center and opened up his legs more and made his skis point toward one another.  I still wasn't 100 percent happy with him, but I had already spent more time than I wanted on it, so this one is what I went with.

Here is a screen shot where I'm working on the fur texture on his face. The image was created in Corel Painter and I primarily used the gouache brushes, a few of the chalks and pastels for texture along with some of the sponges. In the final stage, I added some detail with a leaky pen brush.

The background was heavily influenced by a background I saw in a "Casper the Friendly Ghost" cartoon which I had recently watched (yes, I still watch cartoons!).

Illustration Friday - Equipment

Earlier in the week I had been drawing some rabbit characters, so when I found out the word for this week's Illustration Friday challenge, which this week is 'Equipment,' I decided I would incorporate one of these characters into my drawing.  One of the characters that I drew was an old female rabbit character who is using a walker.  She was inspired by my late mom and my first idea was to do something using this character, showing all of the equipment necessary to make an older person's life easier. But when it came to how I would set up this scene I was at a loss for inspiration.

Instead, I decided to do something inspired by my late father who was a plant pathologist.  He had a laboratory filled with all sorts of scientific equipment which I thought would be a perfect setting for this challenge.  I made his laboratory underground, which seemed natural for a rabbit scientist and I gave him equipment that was a little more on the "mad scientist" side of things, rather than the beakers and centrifuges that my father used. I thought of my rabbit as a scientist who is trying to create the perfect carrot and needs a lot of scientific equipment to do so.

I've included my page of rabbit characters that I was working on prior to this week's IF drawing.  You can see the old female rabbit character in the upper left.  I like her quite a bit so I will try and find a setting for her in a future drawing.  I think you can probably spot the character that I ended up using as my scientist.

I've also included my original digital pencil sketch and two in progress shots so that you can see the image in different stages of development.  I had orignally thought of doing this image completely in pen and ink, but as I began working, I began to envision it with a simply colored background.  I tried to go for the style of a 1950's or 1960's animated cartoon, where the line work is fairly sketchy and the color is made up of blocked shapes that don't always stay within their outlines. I started out making the colors fairly dark, but then decided I wanted to emphasize the pen lines, so in the final image, I dialed back the opacity of the layer that contained the painted color shapes. You can see in the final image that I also decided to put my scientist in a lab coat and gave him a giant carrot to hold.