Children's Book: 3rd Full Color Page

Here is the final full-color page from "Peanut Butter and Ellie." All the drawings are finished and I plan to post some of the sketches soon. The book dummy will be fully completed after one last re-write, which I should finish up in a day or so. Then, hopefully this bad boy gets picked up and you'll have a full 32 pages of pure puppy enjoyment sitting on your book shelves. Fingers crossed.







currently reading: "Werewolves of Montpellier" by Jason
currently listening to: Ugly Casanova- "180 South OST"

Landscapes and Scenery

Quick interlude from the book dummy (which will be done this weekend and sketches will be posted shortly thereafter).

I was looking through an old sketchbook and came across these pages that I really enjoyed.







currently reading: "Birchfield Close" by Jon McNaught
currently listening to: Black Keys - "Brothers"

Children's Book: 2 full color finishes

The "Peanut Butter and Ellie" book dummy is officially under way. I opted to start at the beginning and worked up to completion the first spread in the book. You might recognize the figures in this drawing. I had drawn them up a while back and used them on a little promo piece which I posted a few weeks back. I had always planned on using the image as part of the book so I worked up an environment, and now its finally complete.


The other full color page I wanted to do was a single page image that really stood out from the rest of my original thumbnails. It's a scene after Ellie makes a mess in the house and Peanut Butter has to throw Ellie in the tub. This takes place right after she is dropped in and PB reprimands her. I think its a really pivotal scene in the book and was a great choice for a finish.


I now have seven days to get the rest of the pages up to respectable sketch quality. Some are going to be tighter than others, but on my shortened time table it will have to do.

I hope you like the work so far. Let me know what you think.



currently (re)reading: "Hellboy: Conqueror Worm" by Mike Mignola
currently listening to: Menomena- "Mines"

Children's Book: thumbnails

Hey everyone. I recently began production on my first children's book. I've decided to work up a story for a drawing I posted a while back entitled "Peanut Butter and Ellie."

First I laid out the entire book and created thumbnails for each page.



Since this first round of sketches I've tweak some things here and there, moved some images around, added a few pages and then cut some others to make it all fit just right.

In the next two weeks, I will be creating 1 - 2 finished color spread and I'm shooting to have the other 30 pages done as fairly tight sketches. I have A LOT of work ahead of me, but I'll make it happen.

On June 12th I have a meeting set up with a BIG publisher, so these coming weeks will be filled with non-stop drawing, very little sleep and a lot of excitement. I'll be posting a few sketches and the finished full color piece as soon as I complete them so keep checking back.


currently reading: "Hellboy: The Wild Hunt" by Mignola and Fegredo
currently listening to: Tokyo Police Club- "Champ"

Fowl excuses

- Alice Update: Ugh... usual excuses, I got busy, it got side tracked.

The sketch above is what I was working on recently for the piece. Actually, this is an older and way rougher sketch I did. I seemed to have misplaced my more recent drawings. These are the characters from the caucus race. I was trying to combine them with the pool of tears scene. I put a lot of time into the characters and I really liked everything I came up with, but in the end they weren't working for where I wanted to fit them in this odd visual narrative. I'm going to see if I can rework them and move them to another area of the piece, but I'm going to push that until after I finish up everything else.

Up next is attempt five on the cheshire cat. After that I have to throw a mouse into the water, and then all that's left to do is wake Alice up from her sleep beneath the tree.

- One of my drawings was posted on the awesome website Yay!Everyday. Be sure to look around, there is a ton of great stuff.

- At work we just got started on our fourth children's book. Should be a hectic, yet really enjoyable few months to come.

- Recently, I've been spending a lot of time job hunting. I'm currently re-working my resume for the billionth time. Lets hope that all pans out so I can focus more of my free time on the drawing table instead of on cover letters. I promise more frequent posts are coming. I'm in the process of scanning another batch of figure drawings, so check back soon for those.

currently reading: "Bottemless Belly Button" by Dash Shaw

currently listening to: Matt Pond PA- "The Dark Leaves"

The Last Board Room

When I was looking through some of my old work I came across this piece. I feel like this was a turning point in my style. I still really like how it turned out, but it wasn't living up to the standards of now. So, instead of redrawing the whole thing, or even just doing a version with cleaner lines (which I will do at some point), I opted to just change up the color scheme a bit. I think it gives it new life. I like looking at it a lot more now. The thumbnail version holds up better than the close up since you cant see my unrefined line work but again... i think its got something.

currently reading: "Gray Horses" by Hope Larson

currently listening to: Jason Lytle- "Yours Truly, The Commuter"

awww

This was a little something I drew up for my girlfriend. I'm slowly but surely putting together a collection of one off illustrations from our years together. This one was the first night I spent at her place, and the "songs from under the covers" was the name of the mix cd I had made her. The mix is a lost art but I must admit, I'm pretty awesome at it.

In other news I'm still hard at work on "Alice." I reworked some colors, and made huge progress on the water, and I'm a few more working hours away from finishing up the four characters from the "pool of tears" section, the dodo, lory, eaglet and duck (who are all metaphors for the four people on the boat trip where Dodgson first told the tale of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland).

currently reading: "Mesmo Delivery" by Rafael Grampa

currently listening to: Rocky Votalato- "True Devotion"

quick update

I'm back from my ski trip to Colorado and I'm still in one piece. I'm eager to get back to finishing up Alice but I recently I've been flowing with ideas for my graphic novel. So I'm taking a few days to do some research and writing and character doodles. Alice is taking a quick breather but I'm hoping to get some work done on her this weekend and if not 100% getting stuff done next week.

2/5 update: earlier this week I managed to get myself some tennis elbow sans the tennis part. I think I got it from a plethora of jui jitsu classes, so.... jui jitsu elbow? Either way for a few days it was kinda difficult to hold a pencil for a prolonged period of time. So this has hindered my drawing progress to say the least. But today it feels pretty ok and I'm hoping by tomorrow I can get some work done. Weird injury, I don't recommend it.

Alice teaser

I'm heading off to Colorado for about two weeks for some amazing skiing, but before I left I wanted to leave everyone with a little teaser image for my magnum opus of my 11ft Alice in Wonderland image I've been working on and not working on forever.

I didn't want to give too much away, but you can definitely make out some hints of characters. The Mock Turtle was the most recently completed character so i thought I'd make an "in progress" version of him front and center for everyone to get excited about.

I promise this will be done soon. Although I did once again scrap my Cheshire Cat. Take four on him. The only other characters left to finalize are from the pool of tears scene and then the big kicker finale scene to bring it all home. Now that I'm typing this it seems like I have more work to do than I thought, but its coming along quickly these days. Shouldn't be much longer now.

currently reading: "Essex County" by Jeff Lemire

currently listening to: Spoon- "Transference"

Introducing...

Above is the first piece I've done of my children's book characters Peanut Butter and Ellie. I felt i needed something solid before the idea would start coming along at a faster rate than it is.

I've had this title and a basic idea of a plot floating around in my head for a while, I had the moral, i had Ellie's character in mind and even a rougher version drawn up, but it wasnt until i sat down recently and drew up a design for Peanut Butter title that the story started to solidify in my mind.

I've been taking notes, and making thumbnails trying to let the story grow out of the sketches in a natural way. I'm letting the drawings tell me what they want. I'm really excited about this project. It's going to be a long term thing, but I couldn't wait to introduce everyone to the pups.

currently reading: "Paradiso" by Marcus Sanders & Sandow Birk

currently listening to: Built to Spill- "There is No Enemy"