Illustration Friday - Rescue

Final image

This week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge is the word "Rescue," and I am submitting a piece that I actually created three years ago. It was a piece I did for fun, my attempt at creating an image that looked like it might have come from a Little Golden Book.

I always loved the Richard Scarry books and his illustrations showing towns populated entirely by animals. In my illustration, an elephant is being rescued by a squad of dalmatian firemen.

Before I began painting (the final image was created in Painter 11), I created a few thumbnail pen and ink sketches in one of my sketchbooks.

You can see in the first rough sketch that I originally had quite a different look for the dog climbing the ladder. I didn't like his snout, so I changed it to a more boxy shape.

       

Once I was happy with my character designs, I created a cleaned up sketch. From there, I began filling in blocks of color, using Painter 11's chalk and pastel brushes.

Cleaned up sketch created in Painter 11

Starting to fill in areas of color

For the final stepped, I gave the elephant a warmer tone and some reflected light from the flames. This helped her to stand out more from the gray building. 

The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This story about a gorilla, two elephants and a stray dog living as caged sideshow animals in a shopping mall is sweet and touching. Told from the point of view of Ivan, the gorilla, it is a compassionate look at the world as seen through the eyes of a caged animal. Ivan has always been an easy going gorilla, seemingly content to watch TV and finger paint. He doesn't seem to mind that he's a money-making display for gawking shoppers. But when a baby elephant is added as a new attraction to the Exit 8 Big Top Mall, and a tragic event occurs, Ivan begins to see the world in a new way. He no longer sees his home as a domain, but as a cage. Through his finger paintings, Ivan manages to make a change for the better for all of the animals at the Big Top Mall.

This book would be an excellent way to introduce a child to the meaning of compassion. It's also a wonderful tribute to the power of art. The book is told in short, almost poetic segments and would make a great read-aloud. It is 300 pages long, but the type is large and there is a lot of blank space between the lines of text. In other words, it's a fast read. As an illustrator, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention the wonderful illustrations by Patricia Castelao that beautifully capture the poignancy of the story.

I've always had ambivalent feelings about zoos, mostly because I hate to see animals in cages, but the world has changed and fortunately so have most zoos. With habitat loss a major concern for many wild animals, zoos are in the forefront in trying to save many of the world's endangered animals. And although zoos still aren't the ideal home for a wild animal, they sure beat the conditions that Ivan and Ruby have endured living in a shopping mall.

Applegate was inspired by a real gorilla named Ivan who spent 27 years on display in a shopping mall in Tacoma, Washington. Due to the efforts of animal rights activists, Ivan was finally sent to live in a zoo in Atlanta, where, for the first time in his life, he was able to interact with other gorillas. Ivan was still alive when this book was released earlier this year, but sadly he died on August 21st, 2012. He had been in declining health for a number of years and died while under anesthesia administered to him during a routine physical exam.

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Illustration Friday - Immoveable

With these 'Illustration Friday' challenges I usually tend to go with the first thing that pops into my head and this week was no exception.  When I saw the word "immoveable," the first thing I thought of was a very small creature trying to move a much larger one. I immediately thought of a mouse and an elephant. The mouse is trying to have a picnic on the park bench, but a big elephant has come and plopped herself practically on his lunch, completely oblivious to the little fellow's presence. He is trying to move her over a bit, but to him, she is completely immoveable.

By the way, you can click on all of the images to see them larger.

My original sketch showed a close-up of the scene, but from the beginning I knew I wanted to show the entire elephant. I was using a small sketchbook and I just didn't plan it well enough. I started with the mouse and then ran out of room. I hadn't left enough space to show the elephant. So, I scanned this sketch and created a new digital sketch in Corel Painter.

Originally I wanted to do the drawing from the mouse's point of view and to show the elephant with a lot of foreshortening, so that its legs would seem enormous and its head would be much smaller, but I just couldn't get it to look right. This was my first attempt.

Here is the final sketch that I ended up working from.  You can see that I adjusted the size of the elephant's head and rotated the bench a little bit counter-clockwise. I also tilted the elephant's head down a bit and adjusted the size and placement of the book that she is reading. I also added some background details, including a few birds.  I colored the image using Painter's gouache and watercolor brushes and to outline the drawing I used Painter's digital pen brushes.

Illustration Friday - Early

The word for this week's Illustration Friday challenge was 'Early.'  Even before I read this week's word, I had been thinking of doing another piece using the female elephant character that I created for the "Rescue" and "Dip" challenges.  My first idea for 'early' was to have the elephant in bed, stretching and yawning as her alarm clock goes off, but I began to feel that was too obvious a choice.  So, instead, I decided to have her doing something that I've been doing recently - getting up early and going for a walk in a park. There are few people in our neighborhood park before 8 a.m., usually just a few dog walkers and maybe a jogger or two. It's a good time of day to see lots of birds, squirrels and rabbits. But best of all is the early morning sun coming through the clouds. This is something I wanted to try and capture in this piece - the early morning light.

The reason that I decided to do the image in a circular format is because I recently went to a presentation of late nineteenth and early twentieth century magic lantern slides. These slides were a form of entertainment before the movies really took off and often they were created in a circular format.  Watching these images from over a hundred years ago, I was inspired to try and create a circular composition.

Above you'll see my pencil sketch and a work in progress image where I've blocked in some of the colors and started adding some details.  The image was painted in Corel Painter 11.  I'm really happy with the way that the clouds turned out. I created them on a separate layer, above the sky layer. Their colors were first blocked in with the gouache brushes, then I added some shading to them using the Real Soft Chalk brush.  I followed that with some blending using a Soft Blender Stump brush. I then ran the Soft Blender Stump across the sky to add some rays of sun. In my final image, I left the pencil sketch layer on, but lowered the opacity.  If you look carefully (click to enlarge the images) you can see the faint pencil lines.

Toys That Remind Me of My Childhood Part 1

If you've read earlier entries in this blog you know that I have a strand of the hoarding gene in my DNA.  So, it should come as no surprise that I still have in my possession a lot of the toys from my childhood. One plaything that I remember being around our home from my earliest memories, but don't really have any recollection of playing with, is this set of heavy-cardboard cut-out figures.  Each figure is backed with a black felt-like flocking that I believe allowed the figures to be placed on a fuzzy background scene.  The flocked backing kept the figures from sliding around on the background, sort of like a low-tech velcro.  I know this because I recently bought on eBay a similar toy called "TV Flannel Funnies."  That toy has this description, " Large Flock-O Board, 50 Flannel-Backed Pushouts, Easy On! Easy Off!!, Use Again and Again."

I no longer have the "Flock-O" background for this set from my childhood, so I have no idea if it was a painted scene or a solid color, but I do have lots of the figures.  I thought I'd share them because I do think the graphics are rather charming.  One thing you'll notice about them is that the off-set printing was way off register, so many of the images bleed off the edges.  I think it kind of adds to their charm.  It's especially noticeable in the figures in the red and yellow coats on the right.  As I kid I always pictured them as conjoined twins, but I think if the printing had been registered properly you would probably see that each of the women had two full legs, rather than the way they appear now where they seem to share a pair of legs.

The figures consist of a strange mix.  For one thing, there seems to be a preponderance of circus and side-show figures.  This strongman is an example, as is the above mermaid. Among the other figures are boxers, skaters, firemen, some buildings and of course some circus animals.

This skating lady in blue has always been one of my favorites.  With her leg extended high behind her, and one arm behind her head, she seems so happy and confident.

As a child, I always thought this lady in her pink bra (as well as the above mermaid) were a little risque, but that comes from growing up in a conservative, rather repressed household.

One of the buildings that came with the set was a hospital.  I think this smiling lady must have been its only patient.

The animals are some of my favorites as is this unusual depiction of a fairy. When I was little I always thought it was some sort of strange butterfly man.

 Of all of the animals, I think these two elephants are my favorites.  Even though I know real circus elephants live out a miserable life, these two purple elephants live in a circus fantasy world where all of the animals are well-treated, well-fed and happy.

I take these figures out of their box every once in a while to look at them, their childlike graphic quality never ceases to bring a smile to my face.

Illustration Friday - Dip

The word for this week's Illustration Friday was "Dip."  Several ideas came to mind for this week's word: strawberries dipped in chocolate, dancers dipping their partner, dipping a doughnut in coffee...but, maybe because we've been having some unseasonably warm weather this week, my first thought for the word was of someone taking a dip in a pond or lake.  I then decided I would illustrate the word as a follow-up to last week's illustration.  The word last week was "rescue" and in my illustration for that word I showed some dalmatian firedogs rescuing a screaming female elephant from a burning building.  So this week I decided I would show what happens after the rescue -  everyone goes for a dip of course.  I'm including my original digital pencil sketch so that you can see the evolution of the piece.  The final art was created in Painter 11 using the gouache brushes and various chalks and digital watercolor brushes.

Illustration Friday - Rescue

The theme for this week's Illustration Friday project is "Rescue."  Here is my take on the word, created in Painter 11 with some slight level adjustments in Photoshop.  Before working on this week's project I had been looking at a lot of Richard Scarry's work, in particular "Richard Scarry's Best Storybook Ever!" I love his images of small towns populated with all sorts of animals, who are always happily going about their daily jobs.  In my image, the fire-fighting rescue dogs, are a little worried about how they're going to manage to rescue a 4 ton lady elephant from this burning building.