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!
haiku ewe
This was the rough sketch I submitted to Big Al for her approval.
haiku ewe
This was the final pencil drawing done on watercolor paper with a Black Grape Prismacolor pencil.
haiku ewe
This is the painted version with all the edges exposed. The final will be cropped along those guide lines you see in each corner.
haiku ewe
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.
A quick watercolor sketch of Frankenstein’s monster.
The other day as I sat at my desk, I had the inspiration to doodle another Frankenstein head. True, I explored a few approaches to this character which I chronicled in detail here on this blog, but the possibilities are endless, and my fascination continues. Frankie just couldn’t be contained.
So I grabbed some scrap paper, and with a brown ink line and some quick, well-placed brush strokes of watercolor paint, this little guy has come to life!
In my last post, I shared with you the preliminary stages of a new illustration I did for the University of Dayton Magazine this past weekend. Getting to do an Indiana Jones type of character was a lot of fun. I enjoy coming up with humorous ideas for things, and in this case it was to make a point about the way our modern Western society holds the mundane in such high, sacred regard. We make idols of the most innocuous things.
If you read the last post, you saw the various thumbnail ideas and the final drawing submitted for approval. Approval had been given, so I moved ahead with the colored piece. This was going to be another of my watercolor/colored pencil hybrids. If you have read my step-by-step posts on the creation of my Where the Wild Things Are tribute painting, or the one a little further back about Frankenstein, then you know I like to do an underpainting to get some of the shadows worked out in advance.
The “Indiana Jones” illustration with a watercolor underpainting of purple and other colors to assist in the shadows of the piece.
You know, this piece will be reproduced pretty small on the page. It’s important for it to make its point as quickly as possible. The focus of the composition is that baseball, which is why everything points to it in just the bare drawing. The strap, the look of the character, the hand poised just above it…you get the idea. I need the coloring to do the same thing.
So, in this next step a whole bunch of paint has been slathered on the paper with that purple underpainting showing through. To draw your attention to that ball, I painted the watercolor in to look as though it is glowing. the baseball has become the primary light source.
This stage of the illustration is the rest of the watercolor painting. You can see the shadow tones peeking through the transparent overpainting.
Once the majority of the paint was done, I masked off certain areas and spritzed in some texture on the green background, and also some on the skin. I also deepened the tone of the edges of the green areas. Then whole thing was finished with colored pencils. And yes, I drew on Babe Ruth’s signature – but for accuracy, I traced it from a photo of a baseball he had actually signed.
Here is the final piece that will be seen in the magazine. The rough edges seem to add to the composition, so they will remain uncropped.
Thanks for checking out my Indiana Jones inspired editorial illustration. And thanks again to the University of Dayton Magazine for allowing me to share this with you prior to their publication of the piece.
“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!
If you would like to go back and see the other posts that led to this moment, feel free to do a search for “Wild Thing” here on the ol’ blog.
And as an added bonus, below are a few photos of my working environment during the production of this illustration. Enjoy!
My desk at the conclusion of the Wild Thing painting prior to adding the colored pencil work.Paints and water. Yippy skippy. And my angelic airbrush. Don’t let the halo fool you. It sticks all the time.My drafting table looking the other way towards my computer. Sometimes I have movies playing on that while I draw or paint.
If you are a fellow Facebook enthusiast, I invite you to come on over and join my Fan Page there. My blog posts are regularly updated there, and from time to time I run contests from there with real, genuine, non-virtual prizes. I’m planning to get a new contest started within the next week or so and would love to have you come be a part of it.
Just a quick up-close and personal look at the colored pencil stage of my Where the Wild Things Are tribute watercolor painting for TerribleYellowEyes.com.
You can see that the Wild Thing’s skin received a variety of pencil colors applied in a hatching manner.The background leaves only received a light purple outline that helped define them, yet remain in the background.For the hair, I darkened some areas with an Indigo Blue pencil, and threw in some light purple highlights in other areas.Here’s a horn with some purple pencil and some yellowish pencil and some brown for good measure. While the outline is dark, it’s still just a dark blue. The only black (whether paint or pencil) in the whole piece is in the pupils of the eyes.And the arm. I have about four different pencil colors at work here. An orange, yellow, pale yellow, and purple.
Thanks for following along on these progress reports about my Wild Thing. One more post to go in which I’ll reveal those terrible yellow eyes!
In yesterday’s post about the creation of this Where the Wild Things Are inspired piece, I mentioned that once I laid in some colors on the beast, those background leaves seemed to be a bit competitive with the characters. The green color is just too bright. Those leaves need to support the characters, not distract from them. So, my new task is a road I didn’t want to go down. Yes, I’m talking about Frisket.
Why don’t I want to go down this road? The potential to mar the painting is great. Let me explain. Frisket is a fairly transparent plastic film with a gentle adhesive on one side. You stick some down on your artwork (it doesn’t hurt the art) so that the whole piece is covered. Then comes the tricky part – with a brand new Xacto blade, you gently cut holes exposing only parts of the painting while protecting the rest. If you cut too hard, you can have deep grooves in the paper that will be hard to disguise with a medium that paints transparently like watercolor.
Why would I do this? Because paint was about to fly. I cut away the leaf areas exposing them. With my handy dandy airbrush that doesn’t get out much anymore (I used to do LOTS of airbrush art), I mixed a cool blue-ish green tone to spray evenly over the leaves to soften them up a bit. Then I took a light purple and spritzed it all over the leaves with a toothbrush.
You can see that the left side has the more brilliantly toned greens in the leaves. The right side shows the cooled down version that the piece ended up with. It’s subtle, but necessary for the overall coloring to work well with each other.A close-up of the leaves’ texture.
You can see that the effect made a difference! The leaves are now “pushed back” a bit in space, even though we’re talking about a two dimensional medium. Since I had the Frisket out, I recovered the leaves with the pieces I had pulled away, and this time exposed the face keeping only the eyes, nose and teeth covered. The toothbrush thing is just too much fun. It’s as much Jackson Pollack as I allow myself to be. I flicked pink, yellow ochre, and purple onto the skin for a little fun texture.
A close-up of the monster’s skin showing the texturizing paint flicks.
Now, somewhere in there I added color to Max, and painted in the stripes on Wild Thing. The lighter area of the fur on top of the arms was achieved by painting with just plain ol’ water and dabbing up the paint with a paper towel.
The Wild Thing’s arm with highlights created by wiping paint away.
With watercolor paint, the removal of paint can be very effective in molding your subject matter. As you can see below, I employed this method again with pulling out some highlights in the monster’s mane.
The hair on the left with highlights created by removing paint. On the right is how it looked prior to that technique.
Well, that’s it for my painting explanation here in Part 6. Come back this afternoon when I’ll do a quick post in Part 7 about the colored penciling of this illustration. Just one more short tease before the grand unveiling of the finished piece tomorrow on TerribleYellowEyes.com.
Often when creating an illustration, planning is always a good idea, especially when you have a client to please. That means at minimum creating detailed thumbnails, a detailed drawing, and a color rough for the client’s approval. This also lets the artist play around with things fast and easy to find exactly what he wants the art to look like. When left to my own devices (as I am for this project), I sometimes throw caution to the wind by not doing all that prep work in advance.
I’ll always start with a thumbnail as I showed you in Part 1 of these Wild Thing posts, but I bypassed the whole color rough stage. I opted instead to wing it color-wise. There’s something inherently dangerous about this approach. Perhaps it makes me feel a little more artistic by playing things more spontaneously in the moment. It’s just a little wild – kind of like my subject matter.
So, I say that because as I choose my colors for this piece, I only have two things to go on: 1. Maurice Sendak’s colors from his original book, and 2. the image lodged in my head (which often looks grander and more lush than can ever be possible here in real life). I know my colors are going to be a little more bold than the original Where the Wild Things Are. Mr. Sendak’s palette was a little subdued which worked really great for his story. I want mine to pop a little more, but even I don’t subscribe to the bright primary colors. They’ll still be a bit tamed. So, I’m off to find that balance.
Enough pontificating. On with the art!
The Wild Thing with his skin tones painted in along with a foundation color for his torso.
Compared to the last image I posted in Part 4 of these progression reports, you can see that the above painting has entered the realm of color for the characters. The monster now has some skin tone on his face, and a base color applied to his torso. You can see that the purple underpainting is holding nicely for the shadows of his face. They will be accentuated a bit more later on in the colored pencil stage. This is when it starts getting exciting for me as things are just now coming to life.
In the image directly below, you can see that now the mane of the Wild Thing has been painted in with tones of blue and brown. Yes, it did cover a bit of the purple underpainting, but you still can see hints of purple poking through.
The Wild Thing now has hair, and a darker tone applied to his torso. Max remains pale.
Also, I felt the light shade I laid in on the torso in the top image was too light. So, here I added a darker yellow/orange tone. This did cover the purple too much, so the purple was darkened a bit. He is a striped beast, so later a series of orange stripes will be added.
Now that I look at these base colors, that background does seem a little too brilliant. I may have to tone it down a bit so that it is more complimentary and less competitive with the foreground figures.
Come back tomorrow for Part 6 which will be my final progression report before the unveiling of the final painting on TerribleYellowEyes.com on Friday.
