Sketches

As I feared this past week left little time for any meaningful drawing. But I did squeeze some stuff in here and there.
The most interesting of which was just one small page of sketches that started out as a brainstorm for a dinos for the children's book but ended up with a small collection of characters. I was fairly pleased with them.

Below is a preview of what's to come. A couple of pages from the the dummy.

Hope you enjoy.

~S

Bits and pieces

The end of another long week. Friday, finally. With my day job work schedule periodically in flux, my time for working on art projects tends to be a premium. Today, for example, I had about a half an hour to squeeze some work in on the children's book. Not a lot of time, but enough to rip out a background and and redraw it the way I should have the first time. The forground and middle ground in this particular scene were fine, thankfully, but sitting in the car with my clip board braced against my knee and the steering wheel make for interesting drawing conditions. I don't know what people passing me thought I was doing, as I'm sure you really couldn't see the clip board from their vantage point.

Anywy, this coming week is going to be extremely limited in terms of "art-time". I'll have more days like the one above coming up. I'd draw when I get home, but in my experience the more tired I am the more stupid mistakes I make and the more work I create for myself by having to go back and fix what I messed up.

Well, I don't feel right about posting an entry without something to look at, so here's a digital piece that I did this evening from memory. On the drive home from work, I get an incredible view of the Sound. Often, the clouds are just amazing. My favorite part is watching the light and shadow play across the water and sky. I could watch clouds for days. I often find them more captivating than the surrounding landscape. But that's just me.

~S

Children's Book Dummy

Well, hey – the first post for the newsletter - I'm excited. It's been a while since I've done one of these, and frankly I was more than a little apprehensive. But thus far, interest has been high enough for me to delve in and start a new newsletter.

So, onto the news:

After much heel dragging, soul searching, procrastination, and distraction I'm finally working on a dummy for a children's book, as yet untitled. The picture shown should give you an idea of what to expect when it's done :o)

With children's books, as an author illustrator, you create what is called a "dummy" (you do this for any picture book that you are illustrating) - essentially a series of sketches, rough or fine-tuned depending on how you like to draw, that show your story and include your text separately all geared at giving a publisher an idea of how well you write and how well you draw and if both work well togther. For me, this has been a lot of fun. Being a visual person, I’ve had to draw the pictures before writing the descriptive test and dialog. I tried doing it like a normal person and writing the text first, but I just got bogged down – go figure! I think in pictures (most of the time) and need to be able to see what I’m doing in order to build the description around the story. As of this posting, I’m about 2/3rds done with the story. I will keep you posted on my progress!

Also of note, I have a couple of impending projects on the drawing board including a fine art commission which should be started in the next month or so.

That's it for now.

~S