my Friend ricky

I've been hearing that the April issue of The Friend is out there, so here are the illustrations I did for it (way back in January). The Art Director there is fantastic to work with, and let me decide which style to illustrate the article. The top illustration is part of a full spread - the white edge between the boys is actually the gutter. The second illustration was a spot for the third page of a three page story.

There's not too much to describe in the step-by-step. The art director gave me pretty tight comps as a base for my sketches, and everything went smoothly from there.

I imported the sketch (done in Photoshop) into Flash. I used the pencil tool to trace, and then filled in all the shapes. Then I went and deleted all the outlines.


This is what it looked like when I was done in Flash. Not every color is a different layer, but there were a lot. When I exported layers, I grouped together areas where I wanted there to be a drop shadow. (In Flash, go to File>Export>Export Image... and then select .png as the image format so you keep the transparency.)

I then imported all those separate layers into Photoshop and combined them into one big ol' file. The spread had 26 layers, and 10 for the little page 3 spots. Once in photoshop I adjusted all the colors, added a Drop Shadow in the Blending options. I added a little extra detail here and there like tree leaves, asphalt stones, blush on the faces, but really there wasn't much. I added a Guassian blur to some of the tree layers to push them back into the distance a little, and then finally on top layer I had a photo of a stone texture that I set to Soft Light.

spring?

Here's a happy butterfly in honor of spring - or at least getting faked out that it *might* be spring. Good ol' Utah. Don't really have anything new to post. It seems most everything I've been working on lately has either been something I can't post, or isn't really worth posting. Maybe I'll have something interesting to post next week.


One small bit of fun from Imagine Learning - I did finally get a two-headed goose into the product. It is an icon meant to represent something "unusual." Hooray for the two-headed goose.

Photoshop Tutorial - Missing Manny

Finally - I've finished a new tutorial. Go HERE to check it out.

brown feller

blackbeard

red femme fatale

lil yellow sunshine

purple zombie girl

green goggles

blue fairy and orange kid

pink drawing

And here's another little rough warm-up drawing. It's kinda fun coloring these loose sketches without having to worry about them being all nice and clean.

green drawings

Happy New Year everyone! I hope 2008 is a fabulous year for us all.

I've been working on a tutorial of one of the pictures from the missing manny book, but it's kind of epic, and i'm kind of epically busy this month, so it's slowly getting put together. So above is an attempt to post at least *something* before we get too far along into the new year.

These are some quick sketches and random doodles from this morning as I was trying to get into the work groove. Tutorial coming soon... hopefully in the next week or so.

missing manny

Hey - happy December everyone!

Here are a few pages from my latest little book at Imagine Learning. It's a pretty fun little story about a missing person mystery on the set of a pirate movie (haven't gotten to any of the pirate stuff yet.) This is just your basic draw and color it all in photoshop style. Also, my detective is a not so subtle homage to Emerson Cod of Pushing Daisies. If you've never seen it, hop on over to abc.com and watch a few episodes. Love, love, love this show..

Don't Fence Me In

Here are some more illos from my little immigration book. It was a fun book to do since I like working in this style. The downside is that I had to do them so fast, there's really no time for careful planning and had to just sort of wing it. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't work quite so well. I did kind of go nuts with the gaussian blur with this book, but it saved time since if it was gonna be blurry anyway, didn't have to spend too much time on it.

On the Illustration: Friday front, guess I didn't even make it the first week of my new resolve. I blame the Holiday. I had a really cool superstition to use too... oh well. I will try to get one done next week.

Illustration Friday: Scale

I haven't posted to IF forever, so I think that will be a new goal to try to do something quick every week. We'll see if I actually do it... And since it's a little too late this week to start, I have two scale pictures from a book about gravity that I worked on this past summer.

The Mighty Mayflower

I haven't posted anything from Imagine Learning for a while. This illustration of the Mayflower is from a little book I've been working on called Don't Fence Me In. I seem to be getting the immigration-themed books lately, since my other book I just finished is about the Statue of Liberty (mostly photos, so no illos to post).

This was done primarily in Flash. The ship was exported in about 7 layers, plus two layers of ocean. The .pngs are all imported into Photoshop, where I add a Drop Shadow to each layer. The back layer of ocean got the gaussian blur filter treatment. There is a texture layer over the top, I think it's a photo of a rock, set to Soft Light. I airbrushed a little on the sails, the sky, and around the outside edges, and that was basically it.

Gallery of Terror

Happy Halloween!

Years ago I worked at a place called Waterford Institute. While I was there, a tradition known as The Gallery of Terror was started. Even though very few of us still work there, the tradition has continued.

This year I did two pieces for two Galleries of Terror. The first, the giraffe (or, as I have decided to name him: Pongo Zarafa) was done to hang in my house for my annual Halloween Extravaganza. It is a copy of a painting that hung on the wall of the set of the tv version of the Addams Family. Also posted for Jeff Davis'Official Gallery of Terror.

The second picture: The Maryn, was painted for our Gallery of Terror at Imagine Learning. Kind of a long story to explain where this comes from, so I won't bother. :-)

Have a fabulously kooky, ooky and spooky Halloween!

major award

I recently got an email informing me Colorful Sleepy Sheep won a Moonbeam Children's Book Award bronze medal in the board book category. Cool - I didn't know it had even been entered. Congrats to author Rory Zuckerman! I actually worked on this book about 4 years ago, but it has a new publisher now, and I guess will be released soon. It was a great project to work on. Hopefully these sell well and we simply have to do another set!

Here is one of the interiors - which is seasonally appropriate. I kinda got carried away with the sheep puns for their costumes. Can you figure them all out?

juggling

Another illustration for Creating Keepsakes. I think this was in the August or September issue, so safe to post.

Also, my portfolio has been updated on the Shannon Associates site. Not much that hasn't already been posted here at some point, but nice to finally have some more recent work posted there. Next step, updating my own website. Oy.

zero

I'm not sure who this dude is, or why he has such freaky big eyes, but there ya go.

This is just a little playing around in photoshop in-between working on real illustrations.