Evolution of an Illustration

I was recently commissioned by FarFaria to illustrate Clement Moore's classic Christmas poem, "Twas the Night Before Christmas."  FarFaria is an app for the iPad and their stories are published for that device (to be honest, I'm not sure if they can be read on other tablet devices or not).  This version I created for them is due to be released on December 24th.  Here is a sneak preview of the evolution of one of the images I created for the story.

Storyboard panels for pages 9-12

Designing for the iPad can be a bit of a challenge.  Unlike a traditional picture book where you have the ability to have an illustration cross over the page gutter (the division in the middle of the book where the pages are joined) to cover two pages, an illustration for the iPad is limited to the size of one screen at a time. For FarFaria's app the main part of the illustration needs to fit within an area approximately 6 x 7 inches (the text will cover the lower portion of the illustration, so any important information needs to be in the aforementioned dimensions above the text).

For this job, the art director requested that I create the illustrations in a specific style. He cited an older illustration of mine from my website that he liked and asked me to create the story in that style. The first step in creating the illustrations was to draw storyboards, one sketch for each page of text. I created these as digital pencil sketches, four to a page. Once these had been approved, I enlarged the sketches to the appropriate size and refined them. For this blog I will be showing the evolution of page 12. All of the art was created in Painter version 12.

Above is the enlarged story board sketch that I used for my digital inking

On a new layer above the sketch, I have begun inking the final line work.

Above is the final inked line art

On separate layers, using digital watercolor brushes, I have begun to color the image

The next step is to start adding shadows

The final image with some darker shadows

Illustration Friday - Sneaky

First off, Happy Thanksgiving everyone! I hope you are all having fabulous feasts and getting stuffed. Now on to this week's blog:

I'm going to be a vendor at a local craft and gift show in a few weeks and I've been trying to come up with Holiday card designs that I can print on my inkjet printer.  I've been so busy getting stuff ready that I had decided I would skip 'Illustration Friday' this week, but then I began thinking of ways that I could combine a Christmas image with this week's word which is "Sneaky." What child hasn't thought of sneaking out of bed to spy on Santa putting out presents?  If caught, I'm sure their parents would tell them that they were being sneaky.  I tried to make my illustration look like it could have come off of a magazine cover from the 1950s or early 1960s.  I was going for a graphic look, with a minimal color palette.  I created the shapes in Adobe Illustrator, saved the layered file as a photoshop file, then opened it in Corel Painter where I added some line work.  I then saved the file again as a photoshop file and finally opened it in Photoshop where I ran it through a Mister Retro Permanent Press filter to give it the look of an old image that's gone through a printing press.  I then did a variation of it where I further restricted the color palette and added some text.

At the bottom, you can see my original digital pencil sketch, that I drew in Corel Painter.

Vintage Christmas

Mark and I are leaving for Omaha on Monday to spend Christmas with his mom, sisters and family.  Since I have a million things to do before we leave, I don't have time to do a regular entry in my blog.  Instead I thought I would post some vintage Christmas cards that I found among my mom's things when I cleaned out her house a few years ago.   You can click on the images to see them larger.  I hope you enjoy them.  Merry Christmas everyone!