Nekkid Frog Time!!

Soon, I'll be working on illustrating my first Children's book. It centers around a frog and his journey meeting other animal friends. It's a christian themed story that I'm excited to be a part of. I don't know much on the story yet, but I know there's a frog in it and that's enough for me to start drawing. Here's my first concept. I'm going to try to do the whole book in a pencil/watercolor style. Not sure if this will be the final design of the frog but I like it okay for my first crack at drawing something cute in a long while. I was inspired by the illustrations in the movie Lilo and Stitch. (My personal favorite non Pixar Disney movie) Now, my only real concern is whether he should wear frog clothes or not. LOL. Generally I consider any animal that walks on two feet to be human enough to be modest. Its a good rule when drawing cartoon animals. If they walk on all fours, they can be nekkid, If they walk upright, they should have some clothes on. But It just didn't seem right to put clothes on this frog. Ahhhh, the many difficult decisions an artist must face! It's a quick sketch but expect a more refined look when I start pumping out pages later this year.

Annivesary Art.... AwwwWWwww

Well, I've officially been married for 3 years. WOO-HOO! What you see below is one of the anniversary presents I gave to my beautiful wife Valerie. Cue the "AwwwWWwws" No more mushy stuff... on to the art!!! I did this with a combination of techniques. Traditional watercolor, Pen and Ink, and painting in photoshop with my trusting Wacom pen tablet. I wanted to do this piece completely traditional but it came down to a couple things.

When you're painting someones likeness you have to be pretty dead on, a slip of the brush and suddenly your subject has a uni-brow and looks nothing like they're suppose to. You counter this by working big so you have more room for detail. But this means more time, and time was not on my side. Besides, digital painting is cheaper, faster, less messy, and you can simply zoom in for you're detail work. But like I said, I did do some of it traditional with the black lines being inked (of course) and the background being watercolor. You can't really make it out, but in my original wash you can see some cool "sparkles" that I achieved by throwing some salt on my watercolor wash. It's a cool trick to add some detail or texture to your piece. (because the salt absorbs the pigment) give it a try sometime. You can finally mix the culinary arts with your paintings! Also your painting becomes edible so even if the picture stinks at least it'll be delicious :)

Old School Art

So this is a piece I did a while back for my former employer Stuph Clothing. As a matter of fact I do a lot of work for them, and have done a lot for them in the past. Ergo..... this won't be the last post with art done for them. They're a great company with some amazing artists. They've also recouped pretty well after suffering the loss of such an amazing artist such as myself ;) Anyway, it was for one of their preprint T-Shirt lines which you can see here. The goal here was to achieve a trendy design that a teenage girl would want to wear. I tried the approach of actually painting the majority of the design as opposed to the usual photoshop or illustrator work. I wanted it to have a more natural free flowing feel. And to me that’s a style easier to pull off in the traditional way with paint and brushes. Designs all done in the computer can have a very synthetic and symmetrical feel. Every now and then it's nice to do something the old fashioned way and resist the urge to rely on the computers tool sets. Although I'm still reasonably happy with this piece, its an area I would like to explore further in the future.