When I began work on the Halloween book Night of the Candy Creepers, one of the first things I did was draw a bunch of costumes for the main character to wear as he went trick-or-treating through the neighborhood. I showed my best ideas to the author, Donna Davies, and she chose the vampire costume for the book. Which was the right idea for a spooky book, but I would have love to draw the cowboy or pirate costume for a story. Maybe someday…
I wrote about my 3rd book with Donna Davies the other day, and I can’t let October passat least mentioning my 4th book written by her: Bye, Bye Boogeyman
For this book, I needed a Boogeyman who could be both scary and fearfull. I read through the story a few times and paid careful attention to the physical descriptions of the Boogeyman. Then I drew up these possible scary monsters (Click on the images to enlarge them)
And then did these scared variations
I showed the monsters to Donna, who picked Boogeyman #2 to star in the new book. I really like #2 (especially after drawing him through the entire book) but part of me wonders what the book would have been like with #3.
I’ll post more about the creation process of this book later this week. But until then, if you want to see more of the Boogeyman, check out the book on Amazon.
Night of the Candy Creepers is the 3rd book I’ve had the pleasure of illustrating for author Donna Davies. I’ve been wanting to write about this book for months (I began work on it last January) but I’ve been waiting for Halloween to come around. For the first half of the story, a kid walks through his neighborhood trick-or-treating while being followed by the mysterious “Candy Creepers.”
I decided that to make the monsters seem even more out of place and spooky, I would have to make the neighborhood as realistic as possible. Thankfully, I just happened to live in a realistic neighborhood. So I grabbed by camera and went for a walk. I took a bunch of great photos and used them as inspiration and references throughout the book.
Here are a couple of photos I took of the neighborhood and the illustrations that I used pieces of those photos in.
If you would like to see more of the finished illustrations, check out the book on Amazon:
Or get the super-cool animated version for iBooks: click here! And it’s currently on sale!
This is Peanut Bear, who was comissioned by one of my first clients after I went into full-time freelance illustration. He was intended to be the mascot for a children’s toy and sporting goods website. Has anyone ever seen it before? I make it a point never to share my work online until the client has used it. But after four or five years, I figure I’m safe.
The project went through many differnt sketches before I landed on the one they were happy with. Here are a few of my favorites. (Please note that these are only a portion of the 14 sketches I showed the client, and that doesn’t include the myriad of sketches I discarded and never showed anyone).
From all the different bears drawn and the sports presented, it’s clear that the client wasn’t quite sure what they were looking for when the process began. And I hadn’t yet learned the skill to read between the lines and determine what the client really expects. I imagine that if the process was done all over again today, I wouldn’t need quite so many sketches. And if you want to test that theory, feel free to hire me to design a mascot for your website or business.
And please let me know if you see old Peanut anywhere online. I’d love to know what happened to the guy.
Last week I talked about designing the main character in my new book “We Believe in Dinosaurs:Practice” based on the song “Practice” by children’s band We Believe in Dinosaurs. Today I want to talk about how I created a page for the book.
For every project I do, I “reinvent the wheel” somewhat, adjusting my style and working method to fit the project. I felt like the prehistoric landscapes in this book required a softer and more restrained color scheme than I usually use. But I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed until I read an article on Drawn.ca about artist Ryan Andrew’s unique coloring methods. I would adapt the technique as I went, but this gave me a starting point.
Let me show you how I worked one of the spreads from the book:
First I worked up this rough pencil sketch which I had my client approve. The book’s unique structure required comic book style inset panels which added an extra design challenge, but I came up with a solution that made everyone happy.
From there, I inked the image like I always do: on paper using a combination of my trusty Rapidograph pens and Pentel Brush pen. The inked artwork was scanned into Photoshop.
From here on, I began to deviate from my usual form. Following Ryan’s example, I colored everything in shades of gray. Major elements were done on different Photoshop layers to make selecting things easier later. By working in grayscale, I was able to make sure that there was proper contrast in the image before I got too deep in the coloring.
But that wasn’t quite enough for me. So I placed in a sloppy watercolor texture in the background. I have a couple dozen of these textures that I’ve made over the years. They help eliminate the harsh, overly perfect feel that my Photoshop work can get sometimes. I used various layer effects (overlay, multiply, screen) as needed so that the texture showed through in places. Then I converted everything to CMYK color mode (this caused a few of the grey shades to turn blue for some reason, but that didn’t matter at this stage).
I had planned to use Ryan’s method of coloring but found three colors to be too restrictive for my tastes. Instead, I used Photoshop’s Gradient Map tool and applied a custom gradient over the whole thing.
This turned my blacks into dark brown, mid-tones green, lighter tones into orange, and the whites became yellow.
I was almost done. But now came the longest, but most fun part: painting in the tones. Using my trusty Wacom Cintique and stylus, I painted in shadows and highlights. And I wasn’t afraid to deviate from my color scheme in a few places. I added blue into the sky and colored the dinosaur kids’ clothing less drab colors. I also lightened color of the linework in the background to help it recede and on the kids’ freckles (or are they scales? I was never sure).
And so here is the final product! I’m really quite proud of it.
I’m not sure if I’ll use this technique again for another book, after a few pages it might have been easier to simply color things using the CMYK values I had already established previously. But I will definitely try it again on a smaller project.
The book is currently only available at the band’s website, which you can find here.
