Illustration Friday - Perennial

It's been a while since I've had time to create an illustration for 'Illustration Friday," but when I saw that this week's word is 'Perennial,' I decided I should give it a go, especially since I just finished the big project I was working on.  Anyway, being a gardener, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw the word 'Perennial,' was flowers.  When thinking of a way to depict the word, my mind drifted to thoughts of my grandmother who, from what I've heard, was an avid gardener. She died when I was seven years old and my memories of her are vague, but I do have memories of being in her Colorado garden, or what was left of it. By the time I was born, most of her gardening days were behind her and all that was left of her garden were some of the perennials that came back every year. So this illustration, a digital watercolor created with Corel Painter 11, is a tribute to my father's mother, whose name was Augusta Desjardins. An appropriate name for a woman who loved to garden.

Illustration Friday - Linked

This week's Illustration Friday word is "Linked."  Once again, a lot of ideas came to mind - Links of chain tying a ship to a dock with a family of rats scurrying up the links, links in a daisy chain, a line of elephants with each elephant linking their trunks to the tail in front of them, two tigers walking side by side with their tails linked, a chain-link fence separating two friends.  But the word "linked" can also mean a bond between two things or two people.  After all, how many times have we heard the phrase "romantically linked?" I wasn't in the mood though to do something romantic.  Besides, I've been wanting to have more pictures of children in my portfolio so this led me to my final idea.  I began thinking of friendship and from there I thought about what better way to illustrate the word than to have two children, bonded by friendship, whose arms are linked as they walk their dogs.

The final art was done in Corel Painter 11.  I'm including two sketches.  The first one is a very loose, quick sketch that I did in my sketch book and then scanned.  The second sketch is a digital pencil sketch done in Painter.  This second sketch is a cleaned-up version of the first looser sketch.  It is this more refined sketch that I used as my guide to the finished art.

The Animal's Garden - Evolution of a Digital Painting

I haven't had time lately to work on this blog because I've been spending all of my time preparing for the upcoming SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) conference in New York.  It has long been a dream of mine to illustrate a children's book. I realized that if I ever want this dream to come true, I need to start putting myself and my work out where it can be seen.  So, even though it's rather expensive, I decided it might be a worthwhile investment to go to this conference.  One of the deciding factors was that there is going to be an Illustrator's intensive day, where illustrators can participate in workshops and have their portfolios looked at by people in the publishing industry.

One of the pieces I've been working on for my portfolio is a scene from a children's story I wrote back in the mid 1980s.  It was a story about an abandoned, overgrown garden inhabited by various animals.   I'm planning on going back and revising the story, but in the meantime, I dug out from my flat files, a couple of watercolor/pastel illustrations that I did back when I first wrote the story.  The paper on which these paintings were done has darkened over the years, and the pastels on the paintings have gotten smudged.  In other words they look dingy and out of focus.  These days I do almost all of my artwork digitally using Corel Painter XI, so I decided to redo one of these paintings on my computer.

Before I go any further, I want to let you know that you can see enlargements of these images by clicking on them.  I started off by taking a digital photograph of the original painting (see the above image). I used a camera instead of the scanner because I didn't want to smudge the painting anymore than it already has been by placing it on the scanner bed.  I wanted to widen the scope of the image, so I also incorporated background elements from another painting.  You can see these in the digital pencil sketch that I did based on this painting.

This might be a good time to show you what my palette of digital tools looks like.  Painter allows you to make customized palettes made up of any tools that you like.  This is great because then you don't have to scroll through their long list every time you want to switch tools.  In this palette I have a hard and soft colored pencil, a #2 pencil, a piece of soft chalk, pens of various sizes, erasers of various sizes and strengths, an oily blender brush, several different sized gouache brushes, a number of different blending stumps, a charcoal stick, two varieties of soft pastels and a couple of sponges that can be used for glazing and adding texture.  There is also a customized brush that I made for another painting to add leaf texture to a tree (I didn't use it in this painting).

Once I had the layout to my satisfaction, I searched the internet for reference photos for some of the animals.  When I found what I was looking for, I roughly cut them out and then pasted them on a layer beneath my drawing.  I used these mainly to give me help in defining the animal's form for shading and fur.  Once I began to paint, I turned this layer off so that it was no longer visible

I began by painting in colors for the night time sky (In this shot, I have the layer with the drawing turned off).

I then began filling in other background elements. To do this painting, I created lots of different layers, so that I could work on separate elements without worrying about painting over something in the background.  Each layer could be turned on or off as needed.  Here you see the layers with the sky, the wall, the moon, the ground, the trees, the cat and rabbit, and finally, the pencil sketch, a total of seven layers.

Here is a shot of the ground layer where I've begun to add some texture and shadows.  I added another layer above this one where I painted in some weeds.  You can see that some of the other layers have been turned off.

Here I've begun to add in some other shrubs and more background detail, including a pond and a sundial.

Here is a detail of a layer where I began to block in the color of the foreground animals.  I mostly used a gouache brush to get in a base layer of color. Then on top of that I added other colors with an oily blender brush.

And here you can see I've begun to blend in some of the lights and darks to create the shading and fur.

To create the animal fur, I discovered that using a grainy blender stump, and moving it back and forth in a direction following the contours of the body was a good way of getting the look of fur.  Here is a rabbit with its color shading blocked in and roughly blended.

Here is where I began to create some fur texture.  Before using the grainy blender stump, I added some highlights and shadows with a soft pastel brush.  This also added texture.

Here I'm beginning to use the grainy blender, moving it back in forth in the direction I want the fur to follow.  If you drag the grainy blender back and forth in the same direction, the blender drags out pixels in a linear fashion, that gives you a feeling of fur.  It helps to go through this process a number of times - blending, adding more lights and darks with the soft pastel, blending again, adding more pastel highlights, blending, etc.  This builds up layers of color helping to give the illusion of dense fur.

Here I've begun to add some texture and shading to the stone walkway.  Once again, I painted the base color with a gouache brush then added dabs of color with an oily blender.  I later added texture with pastels and sponges and painted in some edge detail with colored pencils.

Here the scene is pretty much finished.  Now it's time to add some effects to the lighting.

It may not show in this screen shot, but in this image I've added some glows and darkened areas of the background to put the emphasis on the circle of animals.

Here is the finished piece.