Inspire Me Thursday: Word Art

My first Inspire me Thursday posting!

Trying out some new pens - this calligraphic one bled a bit too much for my liking! So the words are a bit messy, but at least still legible :-)

Aussie critters

Here are the beginnings of a birthday present for my niece who turns 1 at the end of July. Because she lives in the US (Boston) and I live in Australia (Melbourne), I love giving her australeeish things. When she was born I sent over an echidna puppet. (cute!)

so this year I am going to do a triptych of australian animal paintings (koala-kookaburra-platypus). Keeping them quite bold of course for a little one. Below are initial sketches and some colours tests in Photoshop before I get to painting it in gouache.






Hmmmm.... interesting. Before I posted these I liked the one with pink in the middle. Now that I see them all together, I think I like the first one best. The pink is almost too strong and fights with the purple of the platy. The one with yellow-green-blue seems to sit nicely together.... Funny. The one with yellow was the 3rd one I did and I almost didn't do it at all because I was sure the pink one worked well. I'm glad I posted!

CBI class #2

Darn it! Don't you hate it when blogger crashes just after you've written a post with strokes of brilliance and are about to publish? OK, take 2....

So this is carrying on my last posts about a 5 week children's book illustration class I am doing. See previous posts here:
Childrens book illustration class #1
CBI class - storyboards

For this class we were aksed to bring in 3 children's book for show and tell. I took What the sky knows written by Nike Bourke, illustrated by Stella Danalis.
I just got this book a few weeks ago and fell in love with it. It is so whimsical and free. It's done with collage of painted pieces of paper for the background and other tasty treats in the foreground. The story is beautiful too and very simple. Very few words to a spread (sometimes only two or three) and it is all about what we can learn from the sky: how to be blue; or pink; or carry birds; or make leaves dance. It has really made me think about how to illustrate something in a non-literal way. Very inspiring.

Next was My Nine Lives by Clio illustrated by Marjorie Priceman
I like this one because it is in the format of a journal and the illos are extremely loose, almost messy, but in a perfectly gorgeous way. It is basically the story of a cat (written by the cat) of its 9 lives throughout different eras and how he effected change in all those times (for instance, inventing the fork, the clock or discovering jazz!) It is full of humour and fun, is very expressive, and has this great parchment look all the way through.




Last is one of my faves: Are we there yet? written and illustrated by Alison Lester
There is not too much to say about this book except that it is absolutely gorgeous. It won Australia Children's Book Council Picture book of the year in 2005 and it's obvious why. The watercolours are simple but masterfully done. Also the page layouts are very interesting as you can see by the internal photo (sorry such bad photo/lighting) - they read almost like a comic book which is perfect for the subject matter: A childhood roadtrip around Australia. Besides the beautiful illos, i think I just like the story because it's something I'd like to do with my as-yet-unborn-and-still-a-few-years-to go-thank-you-very-much children someday. :-)

One thing Lorette remarked on with my books was that they are all orange. I thought that was quite interesting - totally subconscious! I guess I do tend towards orange/red. Good to recognise that!

So that took up half the class with everyone showing their 3 books. The rest of the class was spent with Lorette giving advice on our storyboards. When it came to mine, she didn't have much to say, except she agreed about not including the lines which question the reader as they are repetitive and unnecessary. She did suggest a different perspective for the last illo - to pull out more as if you are walking away instead of closing in tight again, which I thought was a good idea. I also had a few thoughts of my own so i will post them once I have redone them.

Overall I am enjoying the class but I find it is going a bit slow for me. I guess it's always hard with many students at different levels, but i want to be leaving the class with my head bursting with new information, and that's not happening yet. The next classes should be fun though, next week we're doing pen & ink techniques, then watercolour/acrylic, and then collage, which i think I am most looking forward to.

Well if you made it this far without tuning out or going for another cup of coffee then I'm very surprised!!

I-Fri: Cake

mmmmmm....... chocolate..............

gouache and ink on paper

It happens in threes....

You know when you find a piece of clothing that exactly expresses what is you? (Okay, all the guys have just tuned out) Well, that is how I felt about this coat:



I love it! I feel so good in it. So yesterday, I went out and got white gloves and hat to match, and last night when I went out to meet a friend at the National Gallery where my husband was playing a gig, I was feeling reeeaaally good.

UNTIL, some JERK ran up behind me and snatched my purse right out of my hand. I was 2 minutes away from the gallery. I had enough hold on the purse that he lost his balance and fell down, and I went running after him, screaming obsenities at the top of my lungs. But what was I going to do. I suddenly wished I had been doing Kung Fu for the last 10 years and could have shown him who's boss! But instead, I just watched him in disgust as he ran off into the park to hide in the shadows. Take my money. Dump the wallet i got in Spain. Discard the lipstick I got for my wedding.

Damn it. That really kills the mood. The cops were called, reports were made, wine was drunk. THEN, when the gig was over, I had to take A to the hospital emergency because he was complaining of tightness in the chest, weird heartbeats and difficulty breathing. They did heart monitoring, chest X-rays and blood tests that kept us there until 1am. Everything came back fine - he is completely healthy - just probably a bit too much coffee and not enough sleep. That's my boy. What a night.

And then to top it all off, the chocolate double fudge mocha icing on the cake, as I was putting my favourite coat on, the button broke.

At least that's three down.

CBI class - storyboards

Following on my from last post about my children's book illustration class, here are my storyboards. I decided not to do the story that was given to us, but one that was given to me by a publisher to see if I would want to illustrate it. That was a few months ago, so my guess is it's one of those dangled carrots, but just in case, it's nice to sneak in a bit of "work" and most importantly get feedback on it. (I've only ever illustrated one fiction story which was self-published and boy did I need some feedback on that one!)

Because the story is unpublished and not mine, I am not going to post the actual words here, but instead a synopsis of each spread. Names have been changed to protect the innocent. It is only 16 pages (thank goodness!) The story is basically about an elf and it is quite a visual story, for instance: "Elf (let's called her Emmy) puts on her bright blue polka dotted scarf and looks for her green and orange gloves. Can you help her find her green and orange gloves?" Unfortunately, this last sentence which questions the reader really limits the illustrations. It makes it into a bit of a Where's Waldo thing, and because I'm trying to have the illos enhance the words, not duplicate them, I have largely ignored those sentences. Hey, this is an excercise after all, I should be able to have fun with it right??

So, here are the storyboards - Very rough!! (the horizontal lines are where the words will go)



Emmy got dressed in her stripey shirt and purple pants and sat back on her big bed
I wanted the image to be basically all bed.



She yawned and said "where are my stripey socks to go with my stripey shirt?"
Emmy in silhouette against the window, can see a bit of snow outside.



Emmy put on her stripey socks and elf shoes and looked for her polka dot gloves.
I'll probably put a lot more shoes in. It'll be fun coming up with elf shoe designs!



She put on her gloves and looked for her sleigh with bells that go "chink, chink."
Nice to set the scene, and to see her look out the window from outside, as we saw it from inside before.



Emmy finds the sleigh and looks for her spotty sausage dog
I would like to do the "chink, chink" bits with collage. Also not sure if maybe we need to see her face here.



She hooks up sausage dog to the sleigh and says, "go, go!"
Again Go, go with collage.



They speed off into the night



They come home and Emmy says "where is my big fat bed"? Yawn.... zzzzz.....
A bit of a twist here as I would like there to be the possibility in the reader's mind that she dreamed it all - with sleigh bed and bells, book of stripey shirt and stuffed sausage dog. Will have to make these elements quite obvious I think. I like that it starts and ends with the bed, like bookends!

So it'll be really interesting to get some feedback on this! Can't wait- Saturday can't come fast enough!

I-F: Sorry

(click on image for a closer look)

Sometimes you just need to escape.....

gouache and ink on paper, with a tiny bit of collage thrown in for good measure.

(My first foray into gouache - fun!)

Children's book illustration class #1

Had my first class today with Lorette Broekstra. I got there a bit late! People were already doing there, 'Hello, my name is and I am here because' intros, so I missed a lot of them. Anyway, the class was quite good though some bits of it were 'review' for me. For instance, how a book is always multiples of 8 pages because of how it's bound. The endpapers, imprint page, and title page, etc.

One thing that was good though was we went through several children's books each to look at composition - to notice how some are all double page spreads, some single page with cameos, some with borders, some with vertical or horizontal drawing taking up part of the page, some with illustrative text, etc. etc. That was very good to go through quite a few all at the same time to see all the possibilities and of course it sparked ideas. It was very good too because Lorette had some of her books in the mix, so be able to look at something and ask 'why did you choose to do it this way?' was very insightful.

Our homework is to do a rough storyboard of a book. It can be our own idea, or it can be to reillustrate a book, or she also gave us the text of an unpublished book (i think) to illustrate if we can't find anything else. The one she gave us is quite visual already - It is called Things with Wings by Lisa Jacobson, and here is an excerpt:

Things with wings in outer space!
Aliens in Purple lace
flying past the silver stars
on their way to Planet Mars.

So it could be quite fun to try and come up with illustrations that aren't simply illustrating the text. I don't know, we'll see...

I'll post once I've done some storyboards. :-)

What not to do.

I guess part of the process of 'finding your voice' and playing around to discover what you want to say and how you want to say it is finding out what doesn't work...



With this one I tried to put down a nice sepia underlay, but still with a bit of texture and splatters. Was pretty happy at that point. I added some colour. OK. Played around with thumbprints (why the background looks blotchy). Not so happy with that. Then, I added the birds in gouache. I'd been wanting to try gouache because I had heard how it's like watercolours except it has opacity to it, so that you can layer light on top of dark. This is more natural to me because the majority of my painting experience before taking up watercolours this year was with oils.

Unfortunately, I think I had already given up with this piece by the time I got to the birds. I just whacked on the colour without really even thinking about what would work well, and to my dismay discovered that my 'lifting' technique doesn't work as well with gouache because it is that little bit thicker. hmmm. may have to just use it for highlights. I do really like this composition though so maybe I'll redo it at some point....

So here are a lot of things that don't work. At least I'll know some of what not to do next time!

In other news, this afternoon I am starting a 5 week children's book illustration course with author/illustrator Lorette Broekstra. I am sooooo excited. It's for 2 hours each Saturday and I can't wait to get some more inspiration. I may post a synopsis of each class here just in case anyone out there in cyberland is interested.

Was just about to join Inspire me Thursday when they launched their new site! Check it out - pretty cool. The challenge this week is abstract art however which doesn't really get me fired up I have to say. Maybe I'll join next week....

Also! I finally found out about an SCBWI contest in good time!

Illustrator Contest #19 - Cruisin'
Gas prices haved soared beyond anyone's wildest dreams -- it's time we switched to alternative methods of travel. Imagine you're a child and illustrate the vehicle you would most like to cruise around in. Oh, by the way, you don't necessarily have to be a human child.

Sounds like fun!!!

Pussycat, pussycat

I completely surprise myself by the fact that I have not yet posted something to do with cats for Illustration-Friday. I mean, even my avatar is a cat! I love drawing cats. I love my cat. Yet still, utterly catless.



Well this still isn't for I-F but here's a little pussycat all the same, sunning himself as pussycats do. I did this one on really crap paper, so the colours aren't very strong, but I just wanted to play more with lifting the watercolour to show the layer underneath. This time I did a bottom layer wash of a sepia-toned colour which I really like. I've also thought about dunking the paper in tea. (peppermint? chamomile?) so maybe next time, and definitely on the good paper for that one.

Also playing more with linework, thick and thin. I really like the thick lines, they make the colours pop more, and I like adding the thin lines on top, I think it adds real dimension.

play, play, fun, fun!

I meant to say in my previous posts that the new format for Illustration Friday rocks with its snazzy link viewer and handy thumbnails. Now I feel at least that I get to look at all the illos I really like, and that I'm not missing anything, because I could never get to all 600 of them before. Now I'm ready for the next I-F topic! Bring it on!!!

I-Fri: Angels & Devils

(click for larger image)

rotated so you can see the eevil deveel:



This one stumped me at first. My first first thought was of MC Escher's Angels&Devils (below). This one is inspired by that. While sketching, I started thinking of the light and dark playing off each other, and how that is like the chinese Yin Yang. And there it was, idea born. I was going to leave it B&W at first, but I rather like the colour in the end. done with ink & Photoslop.

and here is a Escher's take on the theme:



enjoy!

I-Fri : Fat

I think he needs to make a new nest!

Having fun playing with textures. Playing with line quality too - I like the thick black lines but not so sure about this style. What do you think?

Playing

Playing some more with 'lifting' the colour. I think I like it, the balloon worked especially well, though I'm not so sure about the linework!

The experimenting continues....