IF- Tall

"Little Jack" 2012
4.25x 6.25 Watercolor, Graphite and Digital.

I can't begin to tell you how happy I am right now!  From concept to finish this illustration took about 5 hours, but that's not entirely why I am excited.  Basically instead of spending hours finalizing my sketch and having to painstakingly transfer it to watercolor paper, I CUT the middle-man out!

Normally I render a detailed/solid drawing, and then transfer it to watercolor paper. I HATE doing it that way because I feel like a machine cranking out a duplicate that usually stinks in comparison to the original.

For this illustration,  I printed my rough sketch off (pictured left) and with a light table began my final sketch ON the watercolor paper.  I started with a blue colored pencil, then finished the drawing with a .9 graphite mechanical pencil.  After that the whole composition came together using a combination of Watercolor, colored pencils, and digital techniques.

IF- Teacher

On my way to wok I was thinking of an idea for an illustration...a teacher popped into my mind. I thought to brush it off until I found out that Illustration Friday's topic was "TEACHER" haha! So i hope you enjoy.

Thanks to Dan dos Santos and his recent posts over at Muddy Colors (link available at bottom of post) I made a HUGE breakthrough in one one of my greatest weaknesses...Value and color structure.  To be quite specific it is structure in complex environment based illustrations...for example if you look at the portrait below I find those type of things easy because it has only 2 layers of depth: Foreground and Background. The trouble occurs when I add a third layer Foreground, Middleground, and Background.  I tend to lose control of the illustration's structure.

Which is why I found Dan dos Santos post so helpful. He summarized value and color structure in 3 basic degrees or steps that all illustrations can be built off of. Some illustrators (such as Andrew Loomis) have more.  The 3 degrees or steps for each are as follows...

VALUE: White, Grey, Black. 

COLOR: Warm, Neutral, COOL.  

You use one per each of the depth layers (Foreground, Middleground, and background). I can't say I've mastered any of these to my satisfaction, but I feel much more confident in designing a complex composition. See my thumbnails, color palette and 3 degrees for value and color  below:

Oh yah...this past week something special happened...

You guessed it...I doubled the amount of kids I have!

Isn't he a keeper?

Dan dos Santos @ Muddy Colors:

Value Structure : http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2012/08/composition-basics-value-structure.html

Temperature Structure (COLOR) : http://muddycolors.blogspot.com/2012/08/composition-basics-temperature-structure.html

IF- Lonely

This is the second illustration in a row that I've started and completed too late for Illustration Friday. sigh.  This was actually 1 week late (my wife is expecting a baby anyday now...and that adds alot of complications.)  Anyway, the topic was LONELY.

So...a couple ground breaking techniques were experimented on this illustration. One being that I kept falling back on a limited palette that I developed beforehand with my colorcomp...

the other being that I colored this piece digitally, printed it off and colored some more with actual colored Pencils, scanned it in and then finished it. See below for a simple breakdown of the whole process.

Just for fun I thought I would include a small version of the whole process in a straight line: