Rain.

One of the books has a lot of rain in it. I was worried that it would be difficult to paint rain so I left this problem for as long as possible. Fortuitously, Stephanie started getting tips about watercolour painting from Ian's mum, and bought me a bottle of masking fluid she thought might be useful to me for rain. You paint the rain drops in liquid latex, it dries into yellow rubber, and then you can paint a wash of paint all over it, I also paint a bit of an outline around each drop and a tail above them, and when it's dry you just rub the latex raindrops off and ta-da! Rain is falling down. I experimented a bit to get this look right. If they don't have a tail they look like snow flakes. They have to be reasonably subtle though.

I tried to find some examples of rain to copy from, but in the end I had to develop my own style to suit the books. Actually, the most helpful information I could use is what I remember from watching Playschool when I was little. One of my favourite episodes, I'm sure I saw it several times on repeats. The lady drew a street in crayons, blue for the houses and cars and yellow for the raincoats, and then washed it all in grey or something, and there was an observation on how yellow looks very bright in the rain so that's why we wear yellow raincoats for safety. So I basically went with that, painted everything sort of greyish and dull, did the raindrops, and went all out with the yellow raincoat. It's as good as I could have hoped! Is this cute or what:

This is one of the better rain pages. It's not as clear when the rain is falling on a garden background, but it's still effective.

Home stretch!

I have almost finished the painting! I did it for a couple of weeks solid, then I had almost 2 weeks doing other things because it was print run and I'm also trying to put some ebooks together by April. This week I swung the ole brush again and only had a few to finish and a few I decided needed more done on them. For example, today I worked on some I had already done, but the people were standing on puddles of grass, with no background, and I thought they needed a bit more 'place', so I painted more grass and some garden beds too. They look heaps better now. I'm glad I overcame my laziness about backgrounds.

And so I think I only have one small picture to paint, of some toys, and I've also started outlining, because I needed the confidence boost. Outlining finishes them. I scanned in the picture I was so devastated about recently, so that you can see how it looks now. I blotted colour out of the face with water and paper towel, which rescued it. The outlining is done with some watercolour pencils, not dipped in water though. I use black and grey and peach mostly. I vary the darkness of the outline, and I do a little bit of shading and try and remember I can be a bit messy, because the more sketchy the pencil outlining looks the more dynamic the illustration is. This part of the job is easy and satisfying!

anxiety

From The Rag Doll.

I've been painting for a week, so I've made progress on one book: painted all the clothes and some other stuff, then the skin. Now I've compared it to the work from the last books, and it doesn't look as good. I had some suspicion, but I thought it was just that they look weak until they are outlined. So I compared to the drawings from last year (not the books, but the drawings, which look 300% better than the books, not that I want to boast, I'm just disappointed at how much gets lost in scanning and reproduction processes) and the verdict on my current work is bad: my skin tones are heavy and flat, my shading is crude, and I haven't been as careful mixing the colours.

Today's work.

Allowing for the difference in the scan quality and lack of outlining, you can sort of still see inferior painting evident in the below example of today's work compared to last years better work. There's a bit of a test there as well, I'm wondering if I can photoshop the skin into a better tone, which does sort of work. Otherwise, I may start again, and just lose a week.

I think I've gotten complacent and lazy. Last time I was so insecure about illustrating actual books that I really laboured over them, but now I'm already an illustrator, so I must be good at it.

So I have to stop and think about it for a little while, go on to other stuff. It's partly also to do with work cycles I think, to use a hormone analogy. This is the PMS stage of the project where I've sunk my normal confidence, I think I'm fat (untalented), I have no perspective (everything looks terrible) my life (work) is crap and boring and I want to take a day off (a day off). Just need to let the cycle move on. I'm sure in a week it will all be better.

In other news, today my entry in ABC 702 Sculpture by the Desk was judged today and won equal first People's Choice! With 5 votes! Thankyou, staff of Matthias Media, and thankyou 5th voter who doesn't work with me.

Wet paint!

Today I wet the paper! This is my workspace: the office kitchen. You can see I spread out, and I have a lot of things. Paint, piles of paper, glass of water to wash brushes, paper towel to dry and clean up messes, digital radio to listen to 2CH and James Valentine and WSFM PLUS Billy Joel month, water to drink, books to check work against.

This is my actual painting in progress. I have been angsting for weeks about what colour dress for Emily, since I'm avoiding pink and I've already used red and purple, and the boys are always wearing blue so it's all a bit too much blue. Today I had a brainwave: orange. I made a bit of a mistake and put red frills on it, I think it should have been all orange. But it still looks very cute with the pink stripy leggings!

And this is my plate of colours. This plate is often used for eating cake off. I've decided to leave all the skin tones till last, so that I can keep it more consistent. It's hard enough remixing strong colours, but subtle colours can vary so easily, and I think I did some correcting in photoshop last time. Hooray for technology! Nothing is lost (well, if not Nothing, at least most things can be clone stamped, retrieved or hacked from a pdf).

Happy 199th birthday Charles Dickens!

One of my favourite authors. A bit harder to read than Jane Austen because he waffles so long, probably because he wrote books as serials and was therefore paid for the length. But what a storyteller. The modern equivalent are TV shows like Lost, which start off with a simple premise (orphan boy, Scrooge at Christmas, death of a nameless man) and gradually expands on the lives of lots of side characters and weaves them together in backstories and so on, gets really engrossing, and brings everything to a big end. And good characters. With really good names. Lady Deadlock, the Artful Dodger, Bill Sykes.

More drawing at work.

I came to work on Thursday to start putting drawings on watercolour paper. I print out my layout sketches, which have been touched up where things are the wrong size or in the wrong place. I blue tack a draft page onto the window in Grimmos old office, and trace onto the watercolour paper on top of it. It's a pov sort of light-box, because the blood drains out of my arms! You can't see through the watercolour paper to trace without light, because it is too thick.

So I just finished tracing the last sketches for The Birthday Party today with a little friend watching me. I don't have my camera to show you a pile of drawings but this is an example of what is on each page.

A neat pencil outline. Pretty dull. It is one of the more awkward drawings, because it's busy, and it was a challenge to draw a child squatting (I draw always from my head, but in this case I had to find some photo examples on the web of squatting children to get some clues, but the right age child from the right angle was hard to find so it's still a lot imagined and it only just works).



I don't like drawing stuff. I like drawing people, particularly cute little kids and especially their feet, but I don't like drawing rooms, walls, furniture, toys. Gardens I don't mind as much. I think the trouble with furniture and stuff is perspective and people have to interact with them. It is much easier to have people in white space. Which looks good, anyway, and we are trying to avoid giving away too much in terms of wealth and class. I think in terms of Kmart, not Myer or DJs, and not too aspirational.


So that is why you have a lot of bare feet and not much furniture.

Full page sketches.

Then I draw full size sketches. I finished them yesterday! We are a little bit ahead of schedule.

Then I scan them in and put them in the layout to make sure the words fit in the space in the picture, and everything looks OK. This is the InDesign layout of the book with the draft sketch placed in.

I often use photoshop to fix a picture. I can cut things out and move them around on screen so that if someone's arm is too long I don't have to go back to drawing and rubbing out.

Layout magic.

Now we are about to catch up to real time drawing!

When we did the first two books we worked out the production process as we went along, so it was pretty hard. We just didn't know what we were doing, how to actually make a childrens book. Fitting words and pictures together is tricky, let alone that the format changed and pages were added after I had already sketched all the pages for one story. Anyway, now we know what the format is and now we have a system for producing them to minimise having to redraw or rewrite when something has already been worked on.

First the story is written and edited, then we have a meeting—author, illustrator and publishing director—to talk about changes. For example, I found with the first books that a lot of dialogue in a big chunk is hard to illustrate interestingly. Things might need to be written with a more careful mind to the illustrated pages.

Stephanie and I then break the text up into pages. We note down where an illustration could be a full spread, where a page-turn is needed for suspense, etc etc, and spread it out over 21 pages.

Then I draw thumbnails while Stephanie helps say what the illustrations will be. This is a good part, because we think very much the same! When I draw something she usually says "That's what I was imagining it to look like!" so it's very easy. Here are some thumbnails. I try and take into account the space needed for the text. You can see the top right one, that's a spread: two page illo. The bottom right is a full page on the left and a spot illo on the right—some objects isolated.

So these thumbnails become the plan for the bigger sketches. They also bring up problems (eg. too much to fit on a page) before I do any real work.

Family proportions.

I was VERY concerned that I kept drawing the children too old. It's hard to be consistant. Feedback from Stephanie was that I was adding 3 years to Luke and Emily, and I was making the littlest boy too much of a baby. So she took some photos of families from church to show me the relative sizes. Then I drew a version of our book family. I scanned it in and used photoshop to adjust their proportions, mainly leg length.

Mum   Ben   Emily   Luke   Dad

From this, I made some coloured rulers in InDesign, so that when I was putting my drawings into the layout I could also check if the relative heights were correct. And then I also had to constantly remember to make Luke and Emily's legs and arms short, so that they looked little. Fat tummies also make kids look young! A few years older and they get much lankier.

I put the least amount of practise into the Dad. He's supposed to be a skinnyish man getting slouchy and parenty. He doesn't show up at all in one book, so thats OK, but in another book he is all the way through, and unfortunately he varies in quality. His face changes shape, his height varies. I really didn't get the hang of him at all. Even in this sketch I can tell that I don't really understand his body because he's straight like a pole and is falling backwards slightly.

So this drawing is pretty much how they look in the books. The end size of the books meant that the drawings are quite small, so the simpler illustration style of this sketch is basically how I ended up drawing the finished scenes. All my lead-up was too detailed and too big. Drawing it smaller like this forced me to simplify, especially the faces: just dots and spots. I find the hardest part of the face to draw is the bit between the nose and the top lip, so at this size I don't have to draw it at all!

Coloured portrait.

Eventually I had to go to colours, and although I haven't done much watercolour, it seemed the most appropriate style: a lot of colour control and detail. Actually, I had no idea if I would be able to do decent watercolour or not, I just hoped I could! So I painted this, which took half or most of a day I think. It was the big test of my illustration technique, because the books probably wouldn't go ahead unless my illustrations looked professional.

Character sketches.

Another installment in my illustration back story! Illustration style finally comes together. Ignore the two little boxes I can't get rid of.

Not very good Emily

Better Emily with practice faces at different angles

Baby brother Todd/Ben

Older brother Luke

Dad and Mum

I did a series of portraits of all the family. Some things I started working out at this stage:

• Eye-shaped eyes don't look as good as just dots and eyebrows. 
• The shorter the arms and legs are, the younger the child looks.
• I like drawing feet.
• I'm trying to make them look messy and casual. It's hard to go against my instinct to make everyone beautiful, but I tried to make the Dad have a bit of a tummy and a receding hairline, the mum look mum-shaped, the kids chubby.
• I've figured out that I should draw hair in big chunky outlines. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't at all.
• I have to draw Emily's body first and then draw her dress over the top and then rub out her body.
• Stripes look really cute. Lots of Bonds-style striped clothing.

Learning to draw.

I did a fair bit of illustration in my design course. I picked illo electives because I fancied myself as a drawer. I actually haven't done a lot of drawing at all in the 5 years since I left uni. I don't make art for fun; since design is my job I prefer to sew or play piano or other things. I've drawn things like tractors for some jobs.

Now, the only way to be a really good drawer is to draw a lot. Like getting better at tennis or knitting. Practise makes perfect. So I did a few pretty bad drawings, then a lot of mediocre drawings, and finally a presentable set of illustrations. I think there is a real difference between my stuff and stuff done by people who draw for a living and draw all the time—their ease of drawing something beautiful. Being so good that you can be simple and eloquent at the same time. I'm not there, but maybe by the time I've done 20 books…

So anyway, there was a lot of work to get good at drawing before I published a picture.

Seriously ugly:

Has potential. Simple, but too cartoony:

Too real: 

Too real… but getting there. Sister, brother, mother actually look very similar in physical appearance to the finished versions, but haven't worked out a painting style yet.

My particular favourites:

I worked out the drawing style for these books with two illustrators as inspiration: Shirley Hughes and Freya Blackwood.

I love how modern and subtle Freya Blackwood's work is, and how people are half real half simplified. I later used her watercolour style as my guide to watercolouring—she's a lot better than me, but better trained and more devoted, so it's only fair. Oh, I wish I could draw like her.

I read some Shirley Hughes when I was little. I love how she fills her pages with childish details: grubby hands, frowns of concentration, pants falling down, wind-blown hair. She has a very unique style I have no hope of attempting!

I also used the photography on pumpkinpatch as a guide for little kid's proportions. By the way, they have a nice range of little girl clothes this summer with hardly any pink.

Coming soon: How I actually figured out my own style.

First sketches.

Starting many months ago...

This is the first thing I drew, I think. It is for a book in the MM series still in the pipeline about a toy picnic or something, and it was a test run when the idea for doing these kid's books was still a hazy potential. It's rather cute and very on the realism side. Realism is a lot of hard work, it was a good thing we didn't go down that path.

Storybook time!

I'm currently doing some illustration. I'm doing some freelance stuff, not very exciting: diagrams of the safe transportation of gas bottles. But at MM I am doing another children's book. Which is a lot cuter. I think I might run out of things to sew soon, so I'm going to share some illustration stuff. I think I might show you the work as I do it. The book will actually come out next September I think, so you are in for quite a ride!

Rosie's Walk is up there because I remembered about it yesterday. I loved it when they read it on Playschool. The sneaky fox steps on a rake and gets hit in the face, haha!! The pictures are cool. It's from 1968. It's so different from the style of drawing I try and do.