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.
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!
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.
“The one effective method of defending one’s own territory from an offensive by air is to destroy the enemy’s air power with the greatest possible speed.”
– Italian General Giulio Douhet (1869-1930)
Boy Scout Sean Sturrock being proudly promoted to the rank of Eagle Scout.
Well, this is the first time Drawn & Quoted has featured a full color sketch. It is actually a piece I did as a gift for a friend this past week. Sean Sturrock is a teenager I know who was just inducted into the rank of Eagle Scout with the Boy Scouts last Saturday. I have been friends with his parents, Beth and Walt Sturrock for twenty years. It has been neat to see Sean go from birth to Eagle Scout. Of course, as a long-term friend, it was my obligation to poke a little fun at his fantastic achievement! Congratulations to Sean, and to his family including sister, Emily!
Having worked on television projects with both Mickey Mouse and Winnie the Pooh, I still love to draw the characters from time to time. Usually it’s for friends such as this piece I share with you today. This was a birthday card I made a few weeks ago for a friend on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday. As matriarch of her family, I thought she deserved the whole queen bee analogy.
Winnie the Pooh bringing a pot of honey to the queen bee on her birthday.
If you’d like to see other things I’ve done for the actual Disney Channel show My Friends Tigger & Pooh, click HERE.
If you’d like to see my other fan/friend sketches and cards of Pooh and the gang in a previous blog post, click HERE!
“Nothing so fortifies a friendship as a belief on the part of one friend that he is superior to the other.”
– Honorè de Balzac (1700-1850)
If you really dig this sketch, and you have an account on Facebook, please come check out the Chad Frye • Illustration Guy fan Page where you can read about how you can win this ORIGINAL ART in a contest that ends on April 20th! On the left side of the fan Page you will see a link to the event “ANOTHER WIN A FREE FRYE SKETCH CONTEST!” with all the details. Come check it out!
