Illo #1 and Lessons Learned

Working on the illos for my son's short story has been quite educational. While it's not a "real" illustration commission, it's given me a sense of what working on a job might be like. I've completed a few drawings in pen/ink. One of them is shown here (critiques welcome):

Suddenly the laughter at the table stopped for everyone was curious about what Jake had to say.

I'm not 100% thrilled about this picture. I started with this one and it's probably the most difficult of the 5. There are several people of different ages - requiring different proportions. They are all seated around a dinner table - requiring lots of "clutter" among the people and lots of legs beneath. I didn't have anything to look at, so I just had to work it out in my head (I did have my son model the hands for "Jake").

This has been very eye-opening, and I've learned many things about the whole process. Such as...

1) Make sure you have lots of time before the deadline to do - and redo - and redo - until you're totally satisfied.

2) This will be the final product for his assignment, but it's really just a 1st draft (after those sketchbook studies) of the entire composition. Now, I see all kinds of issues that I would change if I were to be doing this for a publisher.

3) I have a tendency to shorten legs - one of those proportion issues - but I've dealt with that a little better in drawings 2 and 3 (to be shown later).

4) Lighting is a bit of a mystery to me - I would have liked to enhance this image with effects of the lighting they would have had during that era (candles). But, I didn't have time to explore that and I would prefer to have something to directly observe.

5) Historical fiction is not my 1st choice of genre to illustrate - certainly not with a 1 week deadline! It's another layer added to the illustration - having to think of period correctness of costumes and props. More to think about and research.

My First Illustration Job!

Well, Ok...my son asked me to do some illustrations for a short story he did for his English class.

My first thought was "No - it's your project." But, I talked to the teacher who said students were allowed to have outside help on the illustrations. And, my son has always been the type who would rather have dental work done than do anything arts/crafts.

So, I thought it would be a good learning moment for me - translating text into 5 illos. Now, I have less than a week to do it (and I still have to be a mom and homeschool teacher), so they won't be the quality I'd send into a publisher. But, it's still good practice nonetheless.

The story is about the Revolutionary War. So, these are some sketches I've done, just practicing figures and costumes. Luckily, I have LOTS of books about this period in history among all my homeschool resources. A couple of figures are pretty close copies to some in a Revolutionary War coloring book (disclaimer in case you recognize them). Of course, I won't be using those figures - the rather stiff-looking General (above) I copied for warm-up and for the uniform. The woman (below) I used for the pose (her face and hair are different, and she was holding a long canon ramrod in the original - not waving). Hmmm, now that I see her on the screen, her head looks too small for her body - YIKES!

Anyway, this is a rather serious story so I'm trying not to make the figures too "kiddy cartoony" - that's my goal anyway.

Babies and Dogs

One thing that's sweet about having a very young child and a dog is that the picture book ideas just reveal themselves as you watch them interact. I've got a couple that I think might be worth pursuing. So, today I was motivated to start doing more sketches of Lindy while she's still small. I want to catalog a lot of different poses for when I have time to work on a book.




She happened to be napping on the floor this afternoon (hey - if she's sleeping well where she's at...). I liked the angle I could see from my spot on the couch - a little foreshortening. Unfortunately, I didn't work small enough to fit in the foot that was hanging out of the blanket. But, I was happy with how it came together since I was working really quickly - you never know how long she's going to stay still (even when she's sleeping). The other sketches were done really quickly since she was awake - hard to get the right proportions!

I'll be sketching the dog, too.