Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Digital Colored Pencil

For a long time now I've been lamenting about how long my colored pencil work takes to do, and how its not always practical for my commercial illustration work, especially children's books. I love love love how it looks, and love doing it, but it just takes too darned long. Also, as the demand for digital work keeps increasing, I've been feeling kind of stuck and depressed, thinking that the 'look' and technique I had developed was fast becoming obsolete. What's a colored pencil artist to do? I wondered.

Then I found Will Terry's Digital Painting in Photoshop course, and I had a Eureka! moment. I highly highly recommend getting this if you think you might want to learn how to paint digitally. He shows his process for painting digitally with texture, which I adapted to make a 'colored pencil look'.

Here's my first practice painting, an attempt at replicating the illustration below it, which is all colored pencil.


above -digital
below - real colored pencils

Its not too bad a start, for a first try. I didn't take it 'all the way', since I don't want to keep repainting an old piece forever, but did enough to feel comfortable knowing this is actually possible, and to have something to show you.

The first thing I did after I figured out how to make the texture I wanted was a sort of gray scale, to practice controlling values ~



Painting digitally like this is so much like doing it by hand - you work in layers, building up the color, just like you would with actual pencils. Its still not fast, but its also not as slow as 'real' pencils. Also, you can try a new color, change your mind, erase, etc. without a lot of fuss. This is key when doing illustration work - often changes need to be made, like "can you make the boys shirt blue instead of green" or "please add one more child on the left side" or "change that hairstyle" or whatever. Working digitally, those changes are soooooooooooo much easier.

Here's how that little snippet of illustration looks, broken down into layers (and you can see I painted some of the 'raspberry' layer on the 'blueberry' layer, but that's OK). So let's say I decided to turn the blueberries into kumquats or something, or wanted to change the background color - I could just delete that layer and make a new one, or erase and make changes, without affecting the rest of the illustration. Like magic!






When you're finished you flatten the whole thing down into one piece, and voila! you have a finished piece.

So I'm pretty excited about this! And now just have to put together a whole new portfolio of digital colored pencil pieces to show around. That's all. :~)

(And of course I'm still going to do 'real' colored pencil work. That will be the "fine art" side of me, for commissions and pieces people want to hang on their walls. This new digital look is just for print work.)




Friday, March 25, 2011

Illustration Friday - "Toy"

This is one of my kitties' toys. Funny, we buy them things we think they'd like, and I often wonder what they'd pick out for themselves if given the option.






This was done with colored pencils on illustration board.

Speaking of colored pencils ~ I'm not entering CPSA this year (the deadline is the 31st). I've been spending a lot of time doing things other than straight colored pencil work this past year, and don't have anything 'show worthy'. There's always next year, right? Good luck to all of you who do enter!



Sunday, March 20, 2011

Chocolate Figs

Gosh, it feels like forever since I've posted anything. I've been busy, and have several things on the board in "various states of undress", if you will. So I'll post more eventually. But for now, just finished up this one ~


(click to see it bigger)

I had lots of fun with this. I combined loose watercolor with digital. Still trying new ideas, trying to find my 'digital style'.

First I painted all the illustrations with watercolor pencils on a sheet of Arches. Then those got scanned in and placed on the page, and I did some linework with Photoshop. Next came the type. I really really tried to stay loose (except for the printed type, but even that is 'casual') as a counterpoint to my usual 'so tight I squeak' pure colored pencil work.

Here's how the naked watercolored fig looked before it got scanned and fiddled with digitally.




I really enjoyed sitting at the dining room table (not the drawing board) with my cup of coffee and a kitty laying on a blanket under the lamp on a rainy afternoon, painting like this (the watercolor part, I mean). It was lovely to get away from the formal drawing table set up and feel a little freer. Sometimes when one is at the board one can feel, dare I say it, chained. Am I right? Not always, just sometimes. Its good to change things up now and then. I'm finding that a combination of time at the board, the computer, and somewhere else (usually kitchen or dining room table) makes for a much more enjoyable illustrating experience! That's not rocket science, but I'm just saying.

So anyway. That's the fig recipe.

Then there's this guy ~



He embodies a spirit I would like to embrace in my work. I think there will be a lot more of this guy and his kinfolk coming from my pencil in days to come.

Happy Spring everybody!



Monday, March 14, 2011

More funny old art

I've been working on some art I'm not at liberty to share, so thought I'd amuse you with some art I found in my files from a while back.


This one was a greeting card. I put people I knew at the time in the picture, heh heh.



This sweater is based on a real one that my mother handed down to me.



Another birthday card. The tagline was "Don't be scared ... its just another birthday!" And again, there are people in here I knew.


Boy, I've had some funny looking friends!