Illustration Friday - Journey

I've been busy working on an illustration homework assignment for a conference I'm attending in a couple of weeks, so I didn't have time to create a new illustration for this week's 'Illustration Friday' word challenge, which this week is "Journey." So, instead, I went through my portfolio and found this image which I did last year. A little gray rabbit is starting out on a journey in a hot air balloon, I think it fits the theme quite well. As you might be able to tell, I've been heavily influenced by children's book illustrators like Garth Williams and Richard Scarry.  My image was digitally painted in Corel Painter using various brushes, primarily the gouache and chalk brushes.

My First Etsy Treasury

Etsy has a feature that allows people to gather together their favorite items from different Etsy vendor shops into what is called a treasury. You can choose sixteen items to feature in your treasury. Most people, when they create a treasury, design it around a theme. Sometimes the theme is a particular color scheme, sometimes it's a holiday theme, sometimes its centered around a particular animal or type of object.  The theme can be anything. I've been on Etsy for over a year now and until this week had yet to try creating a treasury of my own. A few days ago I took the plunge. I love rabbits and with Easter just around the corner I decided that my first treasury would be centered around various rabbit items that I have marked as favorites. I called my treasury Bunny Love.  Check it out if you get a chance. Thanks!

Illustration Friday - Artificial

This week 'Illustration Friday,' presented its participants with the word "Artificial." So many things in our world today are artificial.  We have artificial flavors, artificial flowers, artificial sweeteners, artificial grass, artificial fibers, and if you've ever been to Disneyland, you've even seen a whole menagerie of artificial animals and even artificial people. As I thought about all of these things, the first thing that popped into my head was an artificial rabbit, specifically a statue of a rabbit made from concrete.  Maybe I've had rabbits on the brain lately.  I see them almost every day in my yard and when we were in Wisconsin a few weeks ago, we were able to get up close to an unafraid little bunny (I used some of the photos I shot of him as reference for the bunny in my piece).  At the same time as I was mulling over ideas in my head, I came across a wonderful illustration from a Polish children's book. I'm sorry I don't know who the artist is, but you can see the image below. It shows a rabbit, sitting against a orangish sky amongst a group of flowers.  I love the simplicity of the composition and the graphic stylization of the rabbit and flowers.

I spent a long time working on the background, trying to get the flowers right. I was striving for something graphically elegant and simple like this Polish illustration, but my penchant for realism kept pushing me to add more shading, detail, etc. So, I ended up straying quite a ways from my inspiration.

Below you can see where I've begun working on the background.  You can also see my original sketch which I had on a separate layer.  As I went along, I decided to make the foreground darker, not only to make it a bit more dramatic, but to add some contrast to the evening sky. After I finished the image, I also decided to crop it into a more vertical format.

Here is the little bunny that we saw in Wisconsin.  We had stopped at a scenic overlook for a distant view of the "House on the Rock," and as we walked from the car to the viewpoint, we saw this tiny little guy having his evening meal. He didn't seem at all afraid of us. I was able to get within just a few feet of him for lots of picture-taking.

UPDATE: Since I posted this yesterday, I went back into my image and made a few changes.  I felt the 'real' rabbit was too light and seemed to be floating against the background so I darkened him a bit, and added a little more detail in his fur.  I also added some additional plants and grass details.  You can see the updated version on the right.

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.

Finished - Above and Below

Yesterday, I posted a piece about a work in progress that was inspired by watching the television show "Upstairs Downstairs." Well, I finished it this afternoon, so here is the completed work, which I've titled "Above and Below." As I was finishing it, I decided to add a few elements.  I added a sun in the sky and a couple of earthworms that can be seen slithering around the rabbit's burrow.  This is my tribute to "Upstairs Downstairs," and the art of Mary Blair, who as I mentioned in yesterday's post was one of Disney's top designers (she's responsible for the look of Disney's animated "Alice in Wonderland," and "Cinderella," not to mention the "It's a Small World" attraction at Disneyland). The piece measures a little over 9 inches by about 11.5 inches.  It was done using Corel Painter 11 software.  I'm happy with the way it turned out, I'm even thinking of possibly having prints made to sell.  Let me know if you're interested in one.

Work in Progress - Above and Below

For the past couple of days I've been working on a somewhat detailed illustration that was inspired by the old Masterpiece Theatre show, "Upstairs Downstairs." For those of you who don't know this program, it detailed the lives of the wealthy Bellamy family (the 'upstairs' part of the program) and their servants who worked downstairs.  Their story, set in London, begins in 1904 and ends around 1930. Both the upstairs and the downstairs families are touched by such events as the sinking of the Titanic, World War I, the 1918 flu epidemic and the start of the depression. It's a show that often discusses social class, the discrepancy between those born of nobility and wealth and those born to more common circumstances.  But the show also had elements of high class soap opera detailing the scandals of both sets of families - extra-marital affairs, children out of wedlock, suicide, and even a hostage taking.  Yes, the show could sometimes be a bit 'talky' but above everything else, and what made me such a big fan of the show was the careful attention to the creation of the characters and how they grew over the course of the 25 years that the series covered.  This was a time of great social change and upheaval, a time when class distinctions began to break down.  This is especially evident in season 4 that covers the World War I period.  Some of the servants get jobs outside of the house to aid in the war effort.  These characters, who in the beginning of the series believed that they would spend their entire lives in domestic service, are shown that the world outside offers them other opportunities.  Some, like the rigid household butler, Hudson, cling to the ways of the past.  He sticks to the moral code of the past and feels that society is crumbling when changes in the household bring about new attitudes and behaviors.  Others, like Rose the upper house parlor maid, who as played by the wonderful Jean Marsh, becomes the heart of the show, are young enough to have an open mind and adapt to the changes in the world.  This show is in my top 10 of all-time favorite television shows.  The last episode of the series, when it first aired in 1975 brought tears to my eyes.  As I recall, it was the first time that a television program made me cry.

Over the past few weeks my partner and I've been watching the show on DVD. My partner had never seen it, while I have fond memories of watching the show with my family when it first aired in the seventies.  As I've been watching the show, which as I've mentioned is about two families (and yes, the servants, though they're not related to one another, do make up a family), I began to think about an idea for a children's illustration. My illustration wouldn't have anything to do with servants, or class issues, but two very different types of families that live in close proximity to one another. The above ground family would naturally be a human family, while below ground is a family of rabbits. Since I love the look of the Edwardian period in which "Upstairs Downstairs," is set, I decided I would set my illustration in the same period. While working on this illustration, I've been looking at a lot of work by Mary Blair, the artist who was one of Disney's top designers in the late 1950s and 60s. She excelled at stylized backgrounds and creating scenes with lots of characters. I love the way that she drew children and especially the look of her plants, flowers and trees. So, I still have a lot to do on this illustration, but here is a shot of it in progress. This shot shows the original sketch superimposed on top of the painting, which, by the way, is being done using Painter 11. When it's finished, I'll post the completed image.

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.

Illustration Friday - Subterranean

Today's word for Illustration Friday was Subterranean.  That made me think of animals living underground.  Since it was raining today, I thought I would depict a couple of rabbits sleeping the day away, curled up in their cozy little den, while outside a spring storm passes by, bringing rain and an unexpected visitor - a little chipmunk has taken refuge to escape the downpour in the safety of the subterranean rabbit hole.  I'm including my original sketch so you can see the evolution of the idea.  The idea for the rain actually came to me late in the development of the painting, but I think it added a nice touch.