subtle differences

What was originally just a grey background looks much more interesting with blues and textures scattered in and around. The slightest of texturing comes up and over the leaves themselves suggesting the shadows within a shifting leaf-filled tree environment.

see da cedar

Same techniques as before (with a few new things: I intensified the colors by adding an inner shadow, and took it off the page with a bit of a drop shadow. How handy is the "X" key when switching back and forth with the hide and show while working on the mask . . .  very!



























Next, I grabbed the jpeg off of my blog and dragged it into illustrator, did a live trace with 9 colors and eliminated the lightest shadow to get this infinitely scaleable version of my drawing.

sweet dreams

A little drawing of my daughter and her household's cat Clarence. He only gets to sleep this way when she is asleep; as soon as she wakes up, he's out of there.

I left some extra room at the left of the illustration for spiral binding it into a notebook. I made separate layers for all the main elements allowing  quick coloring once the ground work was layed. These little drawings have always been fun to do.

snowfakes or snowflakes?

Snowflakes have 6 points or sides or whatever you want to call them, six . . . not four . . . not eight, SIX! There is endless variation from that one requirement - "no two alike". However, as a starting point, this is foundational and only forgiven when school children make four sided cutouts, because lets face it, it's harder to fold the paper in half and then in thirds, than it is to just fold it in half and then in half again before snipping commences.
Maybe not everyone has seen a real, perfect, unmelted snowflake that's just fallen and sits fragilely to be appreciated for a moment. My many years on chair lifts only produced a handful of these memories because the conditions have to be just right to see an illusive specimen. - a moment of reflective silence -

So yes, this is personal. Get it right folks; six is where it's at with snowflakes.

coriander

One of our three cats, Coriander. We call him sweet and low (referring to disposition and intelligence respectively). I'm finding that I make a top layer of the line drawing only, using the select - color range capabilities in photoshop, and it brings out the detail a bit more after it's been covered up with the muted colorings.

branches

This time of year I drive along and am totally distracted by the branching individuality of trees in their winter nakedness. Some just are more interesting and beautiful than others, but they are so unique that it makes me wonder at my own lack of creativity in comparison to God's.
It looked kinda barren without the green so I just inversed the selection in Photoshop and splotched in some green suggestion of leafiness - - hey its just a layer, I can do it differently at another time on a different layer if I want to.

Chickadee dee dee

I guess I like birds too. We have a bird feeder right outside our front window and the chickadees are with us year round. The black capped and the chestnut backed queue up on the lilac bush to zoom in and peck around on the feeder. We used to have mountain chickadees too, but it's been a long time since I've seen any of those.
On the technical side, I'm finding that I like to do a light sketch in pencil before committing myself in ink. It leaves me freer to be spontaneous in my ink strokes, if I know that the basic proportions aren't all screwed up to begin with.

midnight tree

So, now you know I like trees. The background on this one has multiple layers of the same blue, the stars created with the eraser in different opacities on different layers.

I've always liked the coloring in vintage illustrations, the blues, oranges, etc. I want to develop a color palette to use in future work. This blue seems to have the quality I'm looking for, or maybe it's the way it covers and changes the black outline.

winter tree summer tree

Continuing on with the drawing-from-imagination thing I drew a little tree, and then gave it some summer leafiness with photoshop, a bit of texture to the bark (- so easy to overdo this). I really do love layers. It gives you the opportunity to try something out and just turn it off if you don't like it.

button on the heating vent

A quick morning sketch of Button as she rests in comfort, covering the heating vent in the front room.

Bumped up the recovery of the scan in camera raw before coloring it in photoshop.

Ahhh, for the life of a cat!

cat

I usually work from life or photos and not so much from pure imagination, so I'm trying to do a bit more in that direction. What better place to do this than at work where there is nothing to sketch besides supplies in the backroom during a break. So here's a little cat sketch scanned and then taken into illustrator to live trace, then into photoshop to color. So many options with colors and textures, how do you choose?

warning, this is a rant

Two out of three "K"s and the "B" are all upside-down 

Marquee Boards with misspellings are bad, (our local Taco Time ran a "SPECAIL"  for so long a few years back, that I seriously wondered how many children in the Oregon Trail School district would spell "special" incorrectly if given a test),  but the flipped, backwards, and otherwise altered-to-fit-the-need letters drive me nuts! - and we're not even going to start on kerning issues.

I think the flipped "N" is the most common, the upside-down "K" and "B" are numerous too. Don't have an "M" handy, just flip a "W" who's going to notice, Ahhhhhhhhh! I've seen substitution of a  "5" for an "S", "1" for an "I", flipped "3" for an "E", you know what I'm talking about. I realize it is a cold and inglorious job to stand out in the public with a long pole and place plastic letters up high on a distant board, and therefore I feel certain that the personnel at the bottom of the seniority list gets stuck with this task. I also realize that the letters can be easily flipped because of the clear plastic they are printed on, BUT it speaks so publicly and poorly for the business when the immediate face it presents is a typographic mess. 

Example: Sandy's Kentucky Fried Chicken marquee sign has been up for weeks with it's special misspelled! Ironically they had to put in extra effort to get it wrong, altering a "P" into the extra "B". These companies spend millions on their national add campaigns, and then blow their image on the local level with their sloppy individual store boards. Not everyone is driven to distraction by a backwards "N", but it has just got to leave a subtle message of, "we didn't get it right and we don't care" to all who pass.

Add caption

Enough of this finger pointing though, and now for a little pause to reflect on all the typo's and misspellings that I have committed, maybe more than a little pause . . . 

Ahhhhh, that feels so much better.

all scan settings are not equal

A woodpecker was at the suet feeder outside our front window this morning, so I took a photo and sketched off of the screen on my digital camera then scanned it.  I tried color document, color photo, black and white photo, etc, all the way through. Color document turned out really light, color photo got all the details without the smudges on the paper, and black and white photo was the best, but I didn't want the pure accuracy of the smudges, so I took the color photo scan into photoshop to play with.

Tree Cozy!

I saw this yesterday and thought is was terrific! Check out Carol Hummel's website to see what other things she has done. She started out as a graphic designer, and continued on from there.

There are just no limits to what can be creatively accomplished. It encourages me to think in a place where I have no limits, to sketch first before I start to get things into finished form on my computer screen. It's always such a temptation to jump into the computer stage and try to figure it out as I go along, but the end result is always more creative if I'll take the time to thoroughly explore a concept on paper.

a story

I drew the picture, Teagen made up a story to go along with it. I can't wait to see what happens!

This is what this page says:

Karen and Susan hurried to catch up, the wind pushing them along until all three stood looking out over a rickety wooden suspension bridge hung between their monolith and a narrow rock pillar. A weatherworn sign stood staked in the ground before the bridge reading, “one at a time please.”
Across the bridge, perched atop the grassy top of the rock sat a cottage with a benevolent plume of wood smoke puffing out of its crooked brick chimney. Without waiting to discuss Karen started across.

Ninja Warrior Day

Brochure, Poster, and Ad for Ninja Warrior Day at the Nike campus rock gym.

i like it! pink martini christmas cd design

Mike King of Crash Design in Portland has created a really fun CD cover for Pink Martini. The cover has three layers of a cutout Christmas village over a retro-pink snowflaked sky, and is topped by a plastic cover sheet with more snowflakes and the title. The CD unfolds to reveal more of the snowy Christmas town and it's inhabitants as well as the main attraction, the CD. Inside, a 20 page sadle-stitched booklet contains more illustrations and the same handwritten font to title the lyrics to each of the 14 tracks. It's really fun and inspires a graphic designer to take an imaginative stab to create something new and fresh - it's always worth it.

twas the season

Hey, it's not even Thanksgiving yet, I can still post pictures of pumpkins until next Thursday! The first one is drawn with my trusty Pilot G-2 0.38, and the second with a cheap mechanical pencil. Both drawings were scanned, and then opened and colored in photoshop. (I love playing with the flow and opacity of colors) I googled an image of pumpkins and then sampled it to get a palette of colors to work with - that's always kinda fun.

trees

A few days at the beach and time for a few thoughts to get drawn out.

coriander

A rough pencil drawing scanned and opened in illustrator with disappointing results - too light, too much detail lost. Then opened in photoshop camera raw and adjusted, then reopened in illustrator, live traced and expanded. Next step might be to paint it in either photoshop or illustrator, but not today.

Father Tim, who are you?

I've been re-reading the Mitford series lately and was once again dismayed when I moved from book 3 with it's wonderful illustrations, and was jolted into the stiff and lifeless renderings in book 4. --Am I being a bit harsh? Probably only because I see too much of my own tendencies in the second style to my own. I tend to get too careful when I'm drawing something that "matters" - too precise, too exact, fill in too many details and it just robs the life out of my subject. Look at the glasses (shudder) and although the details are more and less pronounced, the characters are drawn with the same impersonality as the furniture -- -oh yes I have been there before.

The loose gestures in the original drawings share a feel as well as a subject matter. These are characters who have feelings and convey a sense that they are open-ended and need to be further discovered. There is a time and a place for all styles of drawing, but this comparison gives me a fresh reason to loosen up and draw with feeling.

Note: I've always loved the cover illustrations on the books which are the work of Donna Kay Nelson. While trying to find out information about this illustrator I found this website that has information about illustrators and small images of their covers. Jacketflap.com It wasn't helpful as far as finding out about her life, but it was a resource to link me with a history and range of her published work. Linked in said her location was in Illinois, so I'm supposing that she is the same Donna Kae Nelson at this website that is not up and running yet, but does show some great imaginative examples of her work.
-It's unclear who did the illustrations in the first three books, and I'm commenting on style not artist bashing, so have chosen not to include the name of the artist in the 4th book.

the magician's tree - days 1 2 & 3

the snow flake


the ice bear


and the little grey bird with the golden wings


I'm working on making a new version of a family Christmas book I made many years ago. I'm working off of the original illustrations putting it together in Indesign, and using my own handwriting font.

comfort tea

Ahhhh, my morning tea, or at least the evidence of. The original scan, live traced into illustrator, blob brush painted. So many options with live trace to choose from. I'm finding that the "blur" is useful though. Takes out just enough of the roughness that the lines are softer and more joined rather than that fake irregular jagged boxy look.

Scissors

What to draw, let's draw scissors this morning - and just for fun I did different versions of the same scissors. The originals were scanned into Illustrator, live traced, and colored with the trusty blob brush.