Rob Peters's Blog, page 193

Daily Drawing: Elephant 4

Here’s a charming fellow to start your Thursday with.

Occasionally, I’ll have a potential client that wants to “audition” for a project by drawing a squirrel or swan or whatever it is that their project features. 90% of the time, the potential client will look at my drawing and decide that this squirrel (or whatever) doesn’t “fit the vision for the project” and then goes on to find a different artist. This has always frustrated me (and is part of the reason why I usually refuse to do audition drawings anymore) because it assumes that I only have 1 way to draw any given animal or object. Maybe these daily elephant drawings can help change that misconception just a little bit.

Daily Drawing: Elephant 3

And here’s another elephant! Happy Wednesday!

Daily Drawing: Elephant 2

Day 2 in my month of elephant drawings. I wouldn’t want to run into this guy in a dark alley. But then, I wouldn’t really want to run into any elephant in an alley no matter how well-lit the alley or how congenial the elephant.

So why am I drawing elephants? My lovely wife gave me a copy of The Art of Richard Thompson for Christmas, and I’ve been pouring through the pages– absolutely brilliant illustrations and comics. I discovered that Richard Thompson loved to draw elephants– he drew thousands of them and even began every sketch book with a drawing of one. I wanted a theme to draw all month, so I figured if an award-winning genius like Richard Thompson found enough to draw thousands of elephants, I should be able to come up with 20 or so.

Daily Drawing: Elephant Month!

So, I’m going to try something new. For the rest of this month, every day Monday through Friday, I’m going to draw an elephant and post it here.

So why am I doing this? Last week, the software I use for this blog sent me an email with a bunch of statistics about this site. I learned a little about my regular viewers (there aren’t that many) and what content they liked best. And then it told me that I only posted 7 times in the past year. And that’s far, far too little. (That’s my take on things, not what the email told me. Overwise, that would seem overly aggressive. And who wants an overly aggressive blog software?) And I also realized that most of what I posted was (essentially) advertising for my various books and other projects.

So these elephants are going to be a (hopefully) fun way to get something new out there for you to see every day and to get me drawing something that’s not for a client. I hope you enjoy it and check back often.

 

 

Dodo Colour In Book

A year ago, I had the privilege of working on a project for the Australian company Dodo to illustrate a promotional “Colour In Book” featuring their dodo mascot. Here is the computer generated mascot they use in their ads and other materials:

And here are a few of my favorite pages from the Coloring Book (to use the American term):

Looking back on it, I probably added too much detail to these images–they were probably too hard for children to color. But I had a lot of fun with it. This is one of the few projects I’ve done that I didn’t get a printed copy of, so I don’t know how  the final product looked (or even if my artwork was used).  But I like to imagine that kids all over Australia have been coloring these dodos for the past year.

Anabelly the Smelly Squid

Earlier in the year, I had the pleasure of illustrating the picture book “Anabelly the Smelly Squid” by first-time author Meghan Carlile. It’s a cute anti-bullying story set in an underwater school.

Since a large part of the story took place in the classroom, I had to make sure the room was consistent throughout the story. I briefly considered building and photographing a model classroom like I did for Bye, Bye Boogeyman. But I wanted to add shells and little coral reef-inspired details to the classroom and I knew it would be nearly impossible to keep those straight in multiple angles. So I decided to place the characters into the same classroom background– similar to the way they do it in animation. I have deliberately avoided doing this in the past because I didn’t want the book to look like it was simply cut and paste or that I was taking shortcuts.

I drew the classroom wider than a double-page spread so that I’d have the freedom to move it around and be able to crop it differently on every page.

And then I added the characters into the scene. Notice that I made sure to redraw all the characters for every page–even with the re-used background set, I didn’t want any page to look too similar. (The blank area over the window in this image and the chalkboard in another one are where the text was placed.)

And, just in case you still think I was cutting corners on this book, here is another double-page spread from a different section.

This book was also my first time working with the publisher Zebra Ginko, who is relatively new to the publishing world. They had one of their own designers handle the text placement and book design aspects of this project– which is usually I task that I insist on doing myself. And there are a few things that I would have done differently had I done it myself, but they did a pretty good job with it overall.

If you’re interested in the book, you can find it on Amazon:

Making of The Mad Monster Museum

Last week, I talked a little about my new Halloween book with author Donna Davies, Night at the Mad Monster Museum.

Now, I’d like to take you behind the scenes of the creation of the big masquerade ball image from the book.

I knew that with all ten characters plus assorted background figures, this double page spread would be the most challenging and time consuming part of the book. So, even though it’s towards the end of the story, I began work on it first.

I started out with a few small thumbnail sketches to work out placement of things. I settled on this one, which seemed to do have room for everything I needed.

I scanned the thumbnail, enlarged it to print size, and placed the text it in’s approximate position. It still seemed like a good composition, so I turned the sketch to blue in Photoshop and printed it out at full size. And I drew a better sketch atop the original sketch. The blue lines made it easier for me to distinguish between the two as I drew. I worked around the page, making sure that the major characters were all given the right spotlight and that the reader’s eye would be drawn properly around the page.

When I was happy with the sketch, I scanned it into Photoshop. I have a simple Photoshop action that pulled out the blue lines, leaving the pencil sketch behind. A little touch ups here and there, and it was time to show the sketch to Donna.

In this case, Donna was happy with the sketch and didn’t request any changes. That’s a huge advantage of working with a the same author on multiple projects– you develop a trust in the working relationship that makes things easier. I probably wouldn’t have been able to get away with such a loose sketch (especially in the background characters) with some of my past clients.

So with the sketch approved, I recolored the lines blue (as I did earlier), and printed onto 11×17 Bristol paper to ink the final art. For this project, I primarily inked with my trusty Rapidograph technical pens.

The completed inks were then scanned and the blue lines removed in Photoshop. After a few touch ups, the result looked like this:

Then it was time for the one part of this process that I find a little tedious, laying in the flat colors. With this many figures, it took me a day or so to flat everything. At this stage, I make sure that the colors help the eye move through the piece. Color can direct the eye and change the focal point, so it’s vital to keep things both balanced and moving (I hope that makes sense.)

Let’s see if I can explain that better. Here is a graphic showing the 3 major colors in this piece: orange, red, and green. Orange and green each form a similar arc that guides the eye through the piece. The darker reds create an inverse arc to give a counter balance to everything. I don’t always have the time to put this much thought and planning into a piece, but it makes a drastic difference when I can.

And then the really fun part, laying in the tone and shadows. With so many characters, it’s easy for me to get lost in the details and lose the implied motion I so deliberately created in the flat color stage. I’ve done that more than once and wound up with a non-descript grey blob of an image, which no one wants in their children’s book. So it’s important for me as I paint (and even though it’s all Photoshop at this point, it’s still painting) to keep pulling back and zooming out to view the whole image and not just the parts.  You’ll notice there are a few places that I changed the colors on from the flat color (like the vampire’s inner cape changed from blue to red) to further reinforce the color balance I was trying for.

And so here’s the final page:

And that’s how I create a page (or in this case, a double page spread) for a picture book.

You can see this spread in all it’s glory in the book Night at the Mad Monster Museum, which includes this brand new story and the 4 Halloween tales

previously written by Donna Davies and illustrated  by me. You can buy the new book on Amazon.com. (If you hurry, you can probably still get it before the 31st!)

Halloween Night at the Mad Monster Museum

I have neglected this blog for far too long. It’s been a really busy year and every Monday, for the next few weeks at least, I’m going show off one on my projects.

First off, is my most recent published work: Halloween Night at the Mad Monster Museum.

A few years ago, author Donna Davies contacted me to illustrate her first picture book “The Halloween Queen Who Lost Her Scream.” This is the 5th Halloween themed book I’ve worked on with her, and I must say that this has been one of the most enjoyable and rewarding collaboration I’ve had with an author. And to commemorate our five books together, Night at the Mad Monster Museum is a huge 136 page volume that contains not only this new story, but the last four books as well. It’s a huge chunk of Halloween goodness.

This book features two young people (younger versions of Donna and I) who visit the “Mad Monster Museum” and get far more than they expect when the monsters come to life! I got to draw my own takes on some classic movie monsters and even a surprise guest! (I won’t spoil the surprise, you’ll have to buy the book to see who it is.)

Both this new story and the original book The Halloween Queen Who Lost Her Scream include a monster-themed dance. I hadn’t realized how much my artwork had changed over the years until I flipped through the whole book and compared those two pages with each other.

Here’s the new page from  Night at the Mad Monster Museum:

 

And here’s a similar dance from The Halloween Queen Who Lost Her Scream:

If anything, there’s a lot more figures in that new scene.

You can buy the new book on Amazon.com.

And come back next Monday for another spotlight on my new work.

Charlie Croc: Private Eye #3

If you like a little mystery and humor in your comics, then  you can get your comic reading pleasure from Charlie Croc: Private Eye #3 on comiXology Submit! It’s the Mad Masquerade Mystery and it’s one of my favorites. I know you’ll love it!

http://cmxl.gy/1ibHSMa

 

Bye, Bye Boogeyman Room

I’m pretty sure I promised this post back in October, but I’m just finally getting around to writing it. So thanks for waiting patiently for so long.

When I was illustrating the book Bye, Bye Boogeyman (written by the incomparable Donna Davies) I had a challenge in the little girl’s bedroom. In most of my books,   I play fast and loose with the architecture. But this book takes place entirely in one room. So I had to keep the room dimensions and furniture locations consistent throughout.

And my first few sketches proved that was a bigger challenge than I expected.

So I called my mother and had her send me some of my sister’s old doll furniture. The bed she found was coincidentally the same style I had already planned to draw. Perfect. I set up this little scene with cardboard walls and  playing card for the rug.

And then I took nearly 50 photos of the room.

I didn’t trace any of the photos exactly, but used them as guides to keep things looking right in the book.

And here’s a few of the finished pages.

To see the rest of the illustrations, check out the book on Amazon.