Welcome to the last of my “Haiku Ewe” posts. If you haven’t been following along, “Haiku Ewe” is a web comic by Big Al the gal on GoComics.com. She asked me to fill in for a week when she injured her drawing hand. It was fun illustrating Al’s sweet, little lamb by putting her into scenes of impending doom all while set to contemplative haiku poetry.
Today, you will see the lamb intrigued by some berries, despite a fierce bear about to get all naturey on her. Below are the various steps from sketch to final comic. Enjoy!
This is the rough pencil drawing submitted to Big Al the gal for approval.Here’s the colored pencil line that was drawn onto some nice watercolor paper.The uncropped watercolored piece. Details to be finessed in the next stage!And here’s the final with Big Al’s haiku. I have worked quite a bit for Disney, and am a Disney guy at heart. Only one friend noticed the hidden Mickey in this piece. I even used to hide Mickey in still life oil paintings back in art school.
Well, thanks for following along with these “Haiku Ewe” posts. If you missed any, please CLICK HERE to see a list of them here on the blog, and enjoy! Next week I shall return to thoughts and art of a different nature. Perhaps I’ll share with you some photos of my experience at this year’s San Diego Comic Con!
Welcome to the fourth in my 5-part series of the step-by-step creation of my week’s worth of “Haiku Ewe” comics seen on GoComics.com last week. Thursday’s comic once again pits our little lamb in mortal danger – this time at the hands of a conniving wolf. While that is indeed scary, what might be scarier is the realization that wolves can write, and sheep can read.
Well, that is neither here nor there. Let’s just get on with the artwork, shall we? By the way, all the images today can be enlarged if you click on them.
Enjoy!
Here is the pencil rough drawn on tracing paper. While Big Al always wrote the haikus, I had my bit of fun coming up with the words on the signs. It’s not every day you get to be punny.Here’s the final pencil drawing (with colored pencils) with just a splash of paint on the background so far. I typically paint the element that’s furthest away first, and work my way to the front.The painted version without any finishing touches like additional colored pencil or highlights, shadows, words on the signs, etc.Here is the cropped final with all the little touches that make the artwork pop.
Be sure to come back tomorrow to see Friday’s final post on my guest artist week of “Haiku Ewe”!
Below is the third of my step-by-step of the process in doing the “Haiku Ewe” comic illustrations that appeared on GoComics.com the week of July 20-24. This particular comic was there just one week ago today.
Today’s comic continues the week long theme of the lamb being in mortal danger, but unlike the other days, this one shows her escaping what would surely have been a death of starvation down in that pit. It was nice of the gophers to lend a hand – er, head – wasn’t it?
Well, below are the various stages that I took the time to scan with limited comments. If you’d like to see previous posts on this series, just CLICK HERE!
Here’s the rough pencil version drawn on tracing paper. I will later tape this to the back of watercolor paper and trace it through by using a light table.
Black Grape Prismacolor pencil for the final line once again, with various stages of lighter colors the further back you go to help create depth.
Here’s the final uncropped painting. You can see that I used an airbrush in the pit. This was to help evenly darken areas without losing the integrity of the brushed on paint underneath it. You can see on the left where I was holding it.
And here’s the final with Big Al’s haiku. That “pop up” text kept me thinking of gophers popping up to help the lamb. A friend said something about it in conversation that led me to have her using the gophers as a kind of ladder out of the pit.
Come back again tomorrow to see all the art leading up to Thursday’s final image.
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.
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.
This past weekend I was working on an illustration for the University of Dayton Magazine from Dayton, Ohio, to illustrate an editorial column by Thomas M. Columbus. It actually was quite a challenge. Thomas’ editorial deals with a lot of ethereal ideas about what we consider a relic in today’s society, often calling them “sacred”.
It was quite tough to pinpoint a direction for an accompanying illustration that would pull the page-flipping reader in to read what he has to say. He was talking about the average, everyday person as being a possible sacred relic. So, my initial thumbnail sketches explored that concept. I drew lots of mundane faces with halos. It felt kind of corny, but I could see it working in color.
Some preliminary thumbnail sketches for the University of Dayton Magazine’s editorial page.
I sent the above sketches to Art Director Frank Pauer because the deadline was looming, but it kept gnawing at me. While Frank was pondering the initial sketches, I was chatting with a friend about it when the idea hit me to sketch an idea that was less esoteric and more story-driven – why not have an Indiana Jones type character coming for a baseball signed by Babe Ruth? It’s more of a modern day type of relic, and made more of an editorial comment that complimented Mr. Columbus’ written words. So I worked up the following thumbnail:
The initial thumbnail sketch inspired by Indiana Jones from the famous scene in “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.
As I sent that off, the Art Director came back with the suggestion that I rework sketch C without the halos. So, while he pondered Indy, I did the following color thumbnail sketch of just four faces with a central halo-ish effect. (And yes, for those of you who know me and are wondering, that is me in the upper left corner.)
This is a second stab at the C idea from above. This time with some color splashed in with Photoshop.
As I sent this one off, the Art Director got back to me saying they liked the “Indiana Jones” angle. I was glad because that was clearly going to be the most fun for me to illustrate anyway. So, next, I worked up this final pencil drawing for approval. It got the thumbs up.
Here’s the final drawing of “Indiana Jones” prior to beginning the painting. You can click on it to see more detail.
Check back with me later this week. While the piece is all finished and turned in already, I’ll show you the painting stages and the final piece in my next post! Thanks to the University of Dayton Magazine for allowing me to show you these images!
