Welcome to the second day of my step-by-step progressions of the “Haiku Ewe” comics I drew for last week’s run on GoComics.com. Written by Big Al the gal, the art is completely my interpretation of her haikus. As with yesterday’s post, I’ll keep my comments minimal while letting the art speak for itself. Enjoy!
This was my first pencil rough that I sent to Big Al for her approval which she gave. However, afterwards, I felt the sheep’s expression was too sinister. It looked as though she was stepping on the horn on purpose, and it was supposed to look accidental.This was my second pass. Putting a more frightened/helpless look on the sheep’s face really helped get the accidental concept across better.This is the final pencil (with just a tad of paint on it). I used the Black Grape again for foreground lines, and used lighter colors the further I went back to help create a little depth.Here’s the piece fully painted in watercolor. You’ll notice flicks in the ground plane which were put there by masking off the area around it and flicking paint with a tooth brush. You might notice the addition of a mouse, too. I couldn’t help myself. It’s all rather flat at the moment until….…the final. I lifted some highlights out of the cave with just a wet brush, and added a sweat drop to the sheep’s face. That branch off the side of the cave was in the way, so it was digitally removed. In placing the text, the area behind the letters was digitally lightened so they’d read better. And colored pencil all around was added.
On the official “Haiku Ewe” post on GoComics.com, the idea that a random horn just happened to be there in the wild seemed ludicrous to some readers. I let them know that it was left over from a Girl Scout who came by selling cookies one day.
Check back again tomorrow for Wednesday’s step-by-step progression!
Two weeks ago I shared with you some preliminary sketches for the “Haiku Ewe” comic strip project. (If you missed them, CLICK HERE for access to all my “Haiku Ewe” posts.) My friend, Big Al the gal hurt her drawing hand and asked a few folks to fill in for her so the “show” could go on. I took a week of her delightful strip featuring a haiku poem which was then illustrated with the adventures of a little lamb. “Haiku Ewe” appears every weekday on GoComics.com.
Big Al wrote some wonderful haikus which perhaps she thought I would illustrate in some sweet way. When I read her words, my thoughts immediately went to images of her ewe facing perilous and mortal danger. The contrast between words and images seemed to go together pretty well, and so the flurry of drawings began.
My week’s worth of comics ran all last week. While you may have seen the final images there at GoComics.comJuly 20-24, I thought I’d share with you the artwork progression from rough sketch to final illustration. So, for this week here on the Chad Frye • Illustration Guy blog, each day I will be showing you one day’s worth of progressions. Today is the strip that debuted just one week ago.
Enjoy! Oh, and a few of them you can click on to see a little larger!
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This was the rough sketch I submitted to Big Al for her approval.
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This was the final pencil drawing done on watercolor paper with a Black Grape Prismacolor pencil.
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This is the painted version with all the edges exposed. The final will be cropped along those guide lines you see in each corner.
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And here’s the final. It has been cropped, colored pencil was added in places, and the lettering was added digitally. Haiku Ewe is now officially pondering the meaning of life.
Come back again on Tuesday when I’ll show you the artwork progression for the comic that reminds us we are not yet experiencing the times when the lion will lie with the lamb.
Back in 2005, Disney released a DVD as a part of their Walt Disney Treasures line called The Chronological Donald, Volume Two. This was the second of four two-disc DVD sets of the complete cannon of Donald Duck short cartoons. One of the extras on that set was called “The Art and Animation of Carl Barks” of which I was glad to be a part.
This ten minute extra focused on the work of the great Carl Barks who wrote and drew over 500 comic book stories primarily featuring the Disney ducks during the 1940s-1960s, and even wrote a few more that others illustrated later on. It was through these stories that he created characters such as Gyro Gearloose, Gladstone Gander, The Beagle Boys, and my personal all-time favorite Disney character, Scrooge McDuck.
The video was produced by the Sparkhill media company, a representative of which randomly called me one day. The conversation went something like this:
Hi, I’m from Sparkhill. I am producing an extra for an upcoming Disney DVD about Carl Barks and am looking for folks who can talk on camera about Carl. We got your name from the local comic shop in Burbank who said you buy Disney comics all the time. Would you be willing to be on our DVD?
Well, I paraphrased that, but that’s pretty much how it went down. I practically only buy Disney comics (the traditional titles of which are now no longer published in the USA), so the fellas down at House of Secrets in Burbank, CA, thought I’d be a good one to call when Sparkhill asked them if they knew of anyone. They then asked me if I knew of anyone who could talk about Carl, and right away I suggested my friend Scott Shaw! who I know had known Carl personally. After watching the video and seeing that they only had me, Scott and Jerry Beck on there, I wish I had fed them a few more names of local guys who knew and worked with Carl. I had no idea they really didn’t have much of a line-up to talk about this great man.
I am pretty much just a fan of Carl. I wrote him a few times as a kid, even making him a fun pop-up card for his 90th birthday (he mailed back a photo of him holding it). His work was probably the biggest influence upon me going to work for Disney. I fell in love with his work in my father’s old Dell comics from the 40s and 50s where they were first published, often copying various drawings as I tried to figure out how he did it. His stories were just magical – full of imagination and adventure all over the globe (and sometimes even off of it!). I even wrote a comic book story once, basing it on the series of stories Carl did of Donald’s suburban squabbles with his neighbor Jones.
Carl Barks holding the pop-up card I made for him on his 90th birthday back in the early 1990s.This note from Carl Barks accompanied the photo he sent.
So, as much as I love Carl’s work, just know that the producers of the video didn’t consult with us to approve the final edit. If they had, I know that we would have been quick to point out that some of the art they used in various shots wasn’t Carl’s art, and some of the photos seem to zoom in on guys other than Carl who is standing off to the side, or is not even in the photos at all! I’m not sure why that happened, but it did. Even the art you see below of “Hawaiian Hideaway” was actually drawn by the great (and very living) Disney ducks storyteller, Don Rosa.
Regardless, I was flattered to be asked to be interviewed for this DVD. Carl lived to the ripe old age of 99 (passing away in 2000) and continued to be an inspiration with his many oil paintings of the ducks. No other Disney artist had a greater impact upon me than THE GREAT CARL BARKS!
Last week I wrote about my involvement in helping out Big Al the gal with her online comic strip “Haiku Ewe” since she had injured her hand. This morning my week of comics went LIVE on GoComics.com. You can see a teaser of the watercolored week’s worth of strips below, but please visit GoComics.com each day this week to view the final images in all their glory!
Be sure to come back to my blog NEXT WEEK where I’ll share with you the progression of each day’s comic strip illustration. For now, though, to see the finals, they can be seen EXCLUSIVELY at http://www.gocomics.com/haikuewe (just click on the link to go there NOW!).
On Monday I briefly introduced you to my latest project that will make it’s debut online next week – five days of drawing Big Al the gal’s “Haiku Ewe” comic on GoComics.com. Here is another teaser for you today in anticipation of Monday’s debut.
My personal thumbnails for the Haiku Ewe project.
Above are some of my extremely rough thumbnail sketches of a few of the week’s comics. Al wrote all of the haikus, and I came up with my twisted interpretation of her words. While you may not be able to tell what exactly is going on in these small sketches, I can. They are meant just for me. If I have to submit thumbnails to clients, the sketches will be clearer, but these were done in a matter of seconds to help me with placement and to get ideas down quickly.
I don’t wish to give away too much about the series, but here are a few of my more detailed drawings that I sent to Al for her approval. The first two are just snippets of one of the comic that involves Haiku Ewe and a mountain lion.
This is how Haiku Ewe looked at first. For the final I changed her expression.Let sleeping lions lie. That’s all I’m sayin’….
And this last one is the pencil drawing of the comic that will appear on Monday. You are getting to see the whole drawing because the humor is only fully realized when you see the art with Al’s great haiku. For that, you must wait until Monday!
And if you visit “Haiku Ewe” next week, know that my finals are full blown watercolor illustrations. Each day Al’s sweet little lamb will face certain doom while rendered in beautiful, genuine Winsor & Newton watercolor!
This past Monday night I returned from a trip to New Jersey for a last visit to my childhood home that my parents are moving from this week. Traveling from California to New Jersey generally requires the use of an airplane, an experience I generally dread. No, I’m not afraid of flying. You see, the issue is more that of comfort. I’m a large lad, and airplane seats are made for children.
My mode of operation is to snag a window seat. I’m not one to usually get up during a flight, and I hate to be awakened for someone who needs to scoot by. So a window seat was ordered for the trip to Jersey – a trip that was, for me, the rare direct flight from Los Angeles to Newark. Wonderful! Five hours and it will be over.
I quickly found my seat and settled in. Who would be my seat mate for the trip? Was it that pretty brunette I spotted out in the concourse? Perhaps that professional gentleman with the laptop? Who knows?
There are a few seat mates that for me would be less than ideal. There could be A.the crying baby, B.the annoying chatterbox who regales you with tales of absolutely no interest whatsoever, and C. it could be a fellow large person. Two large people side-by-side can make a plane lopsided, and altogether uncomfortable for all involved. Nah – I’ll probably get that brunette, in which case bring on the five hours! However, I forgot about the D choice….
Yes. Good ol’ D. D never did me any favors in school, and it certainly wasn’t going to do me any favors on this flight either. Letter D was, in fact, a young mother who held a child on her lap (that looked entirely too old for airline policy) for the entire, excruciating five hour flight.
Thankfully, the child was not much of a crier. He held his peace pretty well. In fact, both mother and child slept for most of the trip. One might think this was a good thing, right? No. That smallish woman found a way to spill over into my seat in her sleep, and boy, was she warm! I reached up to adjust my air only to find that the plane was not equipped with personal air blowers. Thanks American Airlines.
Despite the lack of a cooling agent, I managed fo fall asleep. That’s about the time the sweet, innocent sleeping child began to have bad dreams. I assume they were bad. I don’t know what else would have inspired the random kicking he proceeded to take out upon my person. Yes, he was sleep-kicking. Five-hours-of-kicking.
A sketch of my experience getting kicked by a child throughout a recent flight.
Oh wait, I take that back. There are now weather issues in New Jersey. We circled Nebraska for awhile, then had to circle Pennsylvania. Still unable to land, we set down in Washington’s Dulles International to refuel because we circled too much. By now, I had plenty of my own circular bruises on my side as that kid seemed to sleep at least six of what became an eight hour journey.
I’m not complaining mind you. The seats were, after all, intended for that child. It was I who was invading HIS space. Silly me for having other expectations.
I just learned of a special event coming to Disney Stores all around the country this coming Saturday, July 18. Not that Disney needs my help in promoting this event, but I have a certain soft spot for this since I worked on the My Friends Tigger & Pooh series that airs on the Disney Channel.
Seeing this and more and more Tigger & Pooh products in stores makes me a little disappointed that they chose to cancel the third season we were busy working on last year. That’s show biz I guess.
Well, if you have little ones, maybe this will be right up their alley! Tigger, Winnie the Pooh, and a chance to be a Super Sleuth!
A few weeks back, my friend Allison Garwood (known to online comics fans as “Big Al, the gal”) experienced something that, as an artist, I fear all the time. She hurt her drawing hand. Something about torn ligaments. Not pretty. What does this mean to an artist? It means you have lost your ability to hold and control a pencil. That’s right, instantly you lose your opportunity to draw anything. This is never good when you have deadlines. Most of us do NOT have our hands insured by Lloyds of London, so we’re up a creek without a paddle. Come to think of it, if we had the paddle, we couldn’t hold it anyway.
Al is a cartoonist with a regular deadline. She started a web comic with GoComics.com not too long ago called “Haiku Ewe”, and she has built up a decent readership in that time. You don’t want to penalize the audience in a situation like this, so what does she do? She A. holds a contest for readers to submit to win a chance to draw the strip. (It’s the old “Tom Sawyer whitewashing a fence” ploy), and B. she invites her friends to help her out. I fall into the latter category.
So, I have stepped in to draw “Haiku Ewe” for a week. My five days of comics will run on July 20-24. I do have them done already, but I’ll slowly show you snippets here and there leading up to their debut on GoComics.com.
So, my first snippet for you – character sketches. I did a few doodles of her lamb in my own style just to get a little feel for how to approach the character. I hope you like them.
Some rough pencil character studies in my own style of Big Al’s Haiku Ewe character.
As I said, in the coming days leading up to my July 20-24 run, I’ll show you some of my “Haiku Ewe” artwork in various stages of the process. In the meantime, if you’d like to see Big Al’s “Haiku Ewe” comics as she regularly creates them, please CLICK HERE. Her concept is to write a fun haiku poem, and then she illustrates it with her lamb character.
