Watercolor birds experiment

Some quick watercolor birds; playing with wet on wet watercolor.

Faux Book Cover Project - The Poison Pen

Watercolor, pen and ink and a heck of a lot of photoshopping.

Also, please ignore the fact that she has one big hand and one teeny tiny hand.  I'm going to claim that was an artistic choice.

Faux Book Cover Project Number 3 - Snow

The third installment of my fake book cover project.  I'm not bothering to make up author names and put them on the book covers; but I did leave space for it at the bottom of this one.

I think this one was heavily influenced by one of my critique group partners, the very talented A.M. Sartor, who recently completed this cover image: http://amsartor.com/30828/984501/folio1/the-phoenix-project

Basically, it's all about the hair, as usual.

Moray Eel Pattern

A repeating pattern of moray eels and a couple of fish.  I created this using this quite simple tutorial of how to create a repeating pattern: http://www.designsponge.com/2008/05/welcome-julia-and-how-to-make-a-repeat-pattern.html

My first repeating pattern ever! Yay!

Patterning and Silhouettes

I'm trying to learn more about creating patterns.. and I'd like to introduce more patterning into my illustrations. After creating the floral pattern and the one with the snakes and the birds, I started exploring silhouettes and ended up drawing all these fish (plus one narwhal). I may go back and color these in Photoshop and add some texture, but I'm not promising anything.  These are all done with brush pen on copy paper.

Things I learned:
1. I like to draw loopy things, like snakes, squid tentacles and eels.  This also explains my love of drawing hair and chinese dragons.
2. Narwhals, puffers, and cuttlefish are all super cute.
3. My goal this year: to draw things for fun.  I have been falling into the trap of "Is this good? Is this good?" and worrying about my illustrations so much that I sometimes lose sight of why I am doing this.  God knows I'm not in it for the money.  So, even though a pattern of snakes terrifying birds may be a bit odd, I enjoyed drawing it, and you know, I'm a bit odd anyway.

Faux Book Cover 2 - Twelve Thrilling Tales of Terror

Here's the next installment of my experiment in hand drawn type and book cover illustration.

This one is watercolor and pen and ink, assembled in Photoshop.

Faux Book Cover Project - The Oni and the Fox

Well, here's something completely different from me and not really recognizable as something I'd do except for the fact that there's a fox in it.

I wanted to work on my hand-lettering skills and my book cover design skills, so I had an idea to create some fake book covers as a personal project this year. With any luck, I hope to complete at least one a month, ideally many more than that.

This one was inked with a Pentel brush pen and Micron pens, and colored digitally.  It's been a while since I inked anything; it was kind of fun. Maybe I'll have to incorporate black outlines back into my style. We'll see.

Oni, by the way, are Japanese demons. 

Little Women

I decided to try my hand at the Tomie dePaola award this year.  This year's challenge was to illustrate a scene in black and white from either the Yearling, Little Women, or Tom Sawyer.

As I cannot resist anything old-timey involving girls in bonnets and big dresses, I chose Little Women.

This was my original rough sketch, showing Jo editing her first novel. While I liked the idea of the white pages against the dark colored desk, ultimately I didn't feel passionate about this image and decided to go with something different.

So, here's my entry:

This one is almost all digital, with some pencil here and there.  I started with a very rough pencil sketch that I scanned and painted it in Photoshop.

Wintry scene

Some fun with Photoshop; a fox in the snow.  It is without question much more fun to draw something completely random and not at all in my style rather than drawing something I am supposed to be working on.

Regardless, foxes are always fun to draw.

Manga Studio Inking Experiment

More gigantic hair for you.

I don't usually draw much in this style anymore, but I recently purchased Manga Studio since they were having a 90% off sale.  It's a lot of fun to play around with, and is great for inking.  The software is primarily designed for comic and manga artists, and there are tools for creating panels and inserting text easily.  But for any artist or illustrator who wants to do digital inking, I've found Manga Studio to be far easier for inking than Photoshop, and it delivers a very nice, crisp line.  The files can be exported as Photoshop files, so this image was inked in Manga Studio and colored in Photoshop.

Overall, I'm really happy with Manga Studio even though it may just be feeding my love of drawing hair.

Flower girl

This young lady wants to give you flowers.

Imaginary Antelope?

I'm not entirely sure what this is; some sort of imaginary antelope.

Here's an elephant

I rather like this little elephant.

Illustration Friday - Tree

This is a little outside the range of my usual style; just being inspired by some other illustrators I admire.

Shy

I decided to do something for Illustration Friday this week.  The prompt was "shy."

Sleeping Beauty sketch

Got a bit carried away with the hair and the dress, as usual.  Also, I have no clue how to draw a spinning wheel. Thirdly, I learned that Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger on the spindle, not the distaff, as it appears from this sketch.

A Peek at My Picture Book Dummy

Here's another snippet from my picture book dummy.  The benefit of working on a Chinese-themed book is that I was able to sneak my last name into this image.

Promotional Postcards

Just got my new promo postcards in the mail!

A Dapper Fox in a Suit

Here's something to round out my black and white portfolio.  I prefer animals who are snappy dressers.

This one is pencil on bristol board.

A little bit of what I'm working on

This is a little snippet from the picture book dummy I'm working on... done in watercolor, pencil, and colored pencil on Arches watercolor paper.