A wee watercolour just for fun.

Add a Comment

Okay.

It all starts with a drawing.  When I begin I have only a vague idea of what I want and do my best to find it and get it down.  I am improvising as I go and curious to see where it will end up.  I am not thinking in colour when I am drawing but rather in misty monochromatic tones such as Arthur Rackham might have used - nondescript sepia and paynes grey.  The colour choices come later.


I now take this drawing and with the aid of a light box trace it onto, in this case, a sheet of 140lb cold pressed watercolour paper which I have taped to a piece of Masonite - watercolour palette close to hand and ready to go.  I have already begun to lay in a few tentative washes as a way of tip toeing into the picture.  Blue for sky and shadows and yellow for trees.



At this stage I am working in watercolour and just laying in the broad washes in order to get a general feel for the picture I want to make.  I am thinking the light will be coming from the right in a late afternoon warm sunset kind of atmosphere.  I am still being very careful - no bold or gutsy displays of artistic gusto.  Often when I get to this point in a picture I rather like it and think it looks fine just as it is and I should stop.  However I know I must soldier on.


I now have the picture more or less established in watercolour and it is time to switch to gouache which is a much more robust water media.  Both watercolour and gouache are from the Winsor Newton brand and are colour matched perfectly.  Now that I have a reasonably good idea of where I want to go, gouache is going to get me there faster.  I am not yet utilizing the opaque potential of the gouache, that will come later, at the end of the process.  For now I am just putting unmixed colour on the board.



This is where I commit to the painting and continue to add gouache and really get he picture established.  The colour scheme is presenting itself.  The feeling now is that the train has left the station and it is up to me to not run it into the ditch.


Here is where I start to use the gouache in it's opaque form and begin over painting the way you might if you were using oil or acrylic - light colour over dark.  We do this by mixing white into whichever colour you want to make opaque and lay one over another.  In this way I can bring things forward and have them stand out or push them back and have them recede into the background.



The final stage is one I really enjoy.  The painting is mostly finished and I now can go in and refine details and clean up edges.  This is where gouache really shines because I can make all the little corrections and adjustments that finish off an image.  I also like to get in there with colour pencils and make little scratch marks and blur any areas that seem to tight or dark.  I may yet go back in and fiddle with it some more, but for now I think this one is finished.


While I was working on this picture I had the "My Neighbour Totoro"  art book out and occasionally leafed through it for inspiration.  I did not want my picture to look like that movie but I was hoping to tap into a bit of that spirit.

I will be more than happy to field any questions you might have.

Thanks for stopping by.  More soon.

Add a Comment

I would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.  Thanks so much for stopping by.  I hope you will be able to find a little peace and quiet this holiday season as Mr. Fox has with his air-cottage.

More soon.

Add a Comment

Many years ago, perhaps 15 or so, I made this drawing of a forest nymph and turtle.  It has always been a favourite of mine but for whatever reason I left it alone and waited for the right time to paint it.  But recently during a break I decided to give it a go and at the same time get back in touch with an earlier version of myself.  It was surprisingly easy to adapt to the way I used to draw and think about picture making even though the way this version turned out is probably very different to the version I would have painted back then.

Thanks for stopping by.  More soon.

Add a Comment

Sketchbook Update - A bit of recent pencil work. More soon.

Add a Comment

Another quick one.  Painting now, trying to relax back into the process, it's been a while, a little rusty but so far so good - fingers crossed.

Welcome to December everyone.  More soon.

Add a Comment

My little excursion back into the animation business appears to be over for the time being.  Three weeks of intense drawing and design have come to a blissful end and now it's time to get back to business.  Today I'm sharing a bit of warm-up work, a wee doodle of a narcissistic Pixie.

What I have to do now is to let go of the animation world and transition back to my own realm of tree-houses, b and b's and map reading foxes. To accomplish this I will be painting for the next week - no pressure just fun.
But today we have a Pixie taking a personal moment on a flower of somewhat dubious origin.

More soon.  Thanks so much for stopping by.

Add a Comment

Hey

Yes, I have really been out of the loop lately.  I have been lured back into the animation business and  left with very little time for anything.

What I am sharing with you today are a couple of character line-ups I did for the graphic novel before the animation thing started up.  These are meant to be background characters and also a general exploration as to how the Gwelf characters might look in this particular story.

Thanks again for stopping by.

More soon.

Add a Comment

The last drawing for the temporarily delayed, but now back on schedule book of Scottish Mythology.  She is standing on a rocky Scottish shore, draped in seal skins and seaweed.

Thanks for stopping by.  More soon.

Add a Comment

I would have liked to have had more time for Inktober but since that is not possible here is a quick ink doodle of a Pixie.

More soon.

Add a Comment

The main character in my story is Claire.  She is a young artist, 16 or so and she is going to have a catastrophic run in with a nasty,violent witch.  She is a bit of a loner who would rather stay home and work than hang out with her boring peers.

I could use some feedback here.  I have many ideas for how Claire should look.  She could be tall or short, hat or no hat. skirt or tights, long hair or short hair, curvy or slender, etc.  Anyway, here are some variations and if you feel like it, let me know what you think.

Thanks for stopping by.  More soon.

Add a Comment

This is the villain of the story as many of you have probably already guessed.  The story is going to be about a witch attack in Gwelf.  It was big news a couple of years ago but more recent events have pushed it to the back of most people minds.  The pubs and taverns are buzzing with newer news, and yet there is something about this story that really grabbed me so this is the one I've chosen to tell.

The Raven witch is a dark and cruel predator.  She often travels with and is aided by bird goblins.  She carries a long wooden hook for grabbing victims and is well armed with edged weapons, throwing spells and sonic pacifiers.  She is absolutely the last thing you would ever want to see if you were unlucky enough to find yourself walking home alone on a lonely road in Gwelf, after dark, in the autumn or winter.  Pray for a quick end.

Add a Comment

This is going to be the first of a bunch of graphic novel updates, even though it will likely be the last one you see.  I have been speaking with my editor and we are almost there.  He actually liked my most recent version of the story and I think he might have been willing to go with it but I want to take one more pass at it. You can always make a story better and I want to give it one more go.

What I'm showing here is a bit of concept work for where the characters live in Gwelf.  Of course they live in trees but I still have to figure it out, especially if we are going to get inside their tree cottages and see how they work once you pass the front door.

I really want to live in one of these, but for the time being I am going to have to resist the urge.

More soon.

Add a Comment

Back in the spring I was contacted by UK publishers, Total 3D to participate in a new book they were putting together called Sketching From The Imagination - Fantasy.  I did a wee interview with them, sent in some images, and then tried to forget about it.  Then today project coordinator Melanie Smith sent me these pictures from the new book.  It should be in stores soon.  One other cool thing about this book, my wife Patty is in it too.

From what I understand, this book is full of great drawing tips from all kinds of goofy professionals.

Still writing - more soon.

Add a Comment

Occasionally a theme will occur to me and I will run with it, in the sketchbook that is, thinking that it may yield some picture or narrative possibilities.  Like what would happen if you took one of your standard faerie tale mushrooms, pulled it out of the ground, stood it on it's head and then put a or some pixie(s) on it.  I needed to find out.  There are a lot more of these but I think three will do for now.

More soon.  Thanks for stopping by.

Add a Comment

Just a quickie Gwelf image.  Another take on Mr. Fox examining his map for interesting walking routes.  Also, writing for the graphic novel is progressing.  Fingers are crossed.

More soon.

Add a Comment

There was a pixie in the garden this morning but when we went back later, she was gone.

More soon.  Be safe.

Add a Comment

Okay. A bit of recent warm up drawing while I continue to write the graphic novel.  The first outline I sent in was very lean but they were still interested.  I expanded it and they are even more interested.  The editor came back with some notes and ideas.  That's what editors do, they help you tell your story when you're up to your neck in it and can't see the forest for the trees. I'm getting there with the story but there is still more work to do. Anyway, I still try to draw something everyday, even on writing days, like today. Here's a bit of it.

Thanks everyone for continuing to stop by. The graphic novel is chugging along slowly but I sense it will pick up steam once I have the story really nailed down. I hope you all have a peaceful weekend.

More soon.

Add a Comment

As regular followers of this blog will know, I have been writing and designing a graphic novel for the past several months, along with all my usual freelance work - whew! Anyway, the story has been evolving and traveled through several re-wrights and concept changes. The outline I recently submitted to Lombard was accepted (yay) which now means I have to fill in all the blanks and flesh out the full story. Since I cannot share the client work that I've been doing lately I thought I would post some of the designs I did back in early spring when the story was called Hunter and Waif.

The story is no longer called Hunter and Waif and has evolved quite a long way from these early ideas but I still like these characters and would love to be able to find a use for them some day.




Hunter is a rough and tough forester/game warden character and Waif is a wee lost child in need of a rescue. Waif was going to be a bit of a trouble maker and Hunter was going to be too busy and tired to have to deal with her, but being a forest ranger it would have been his job to save her. It would have been a winter survival story.




I have a lot more of this rough work beginning to pile up around here so there is a good chance some more of it is going to end up here.

Thanks for stopping by. More soon.

Add a Comment

Okay, let's get caught up, it's been a while.

I've been buried deep in a morass of projects for the past few months writing, rewriting, and grinding away at client work. So the client work is all top secret as usual, blah, blah, blah NDA yadda, yadda, yadda.  But the writing has been really fun and a wee bit scary. A bit of a revelation actually. It's a lot harder to tell a story than I originally thought - big surprise. It turns out that arranging events in an entertaining way with engaging characters and unexpected plot twists - not so easy. But no hero gets stopped by a little challenge. What kind of story would that be?

I eventually came to my senses after having tried several different concepts and decided to set the story in Gwelf, the fantasy world I often blog about here. It is a story about witches and ghosts, haunted B and B's and all the goofy stuff I usually touch on when describing Gwelf. I will be using all of my previous Gwelf posts as background material and also inventing new ideas to build the story with. It is going to be a lot of fun and I can't wait to really take a big bite out of it.

The European publishers who originally approached me about doing this story have the outline now but what they actually think of it is anybodies guess. I however am not waiting for them to green light this project. I have already committed a fair amount of pencil mileage to this idea and want to carry on. I will forge ahead and turn the outline into a script, using every scrap of time I can scrape together between projects and after hours, as I have been up to now. I want to make this story happen.

That's it for the time being. I've been feeling really guilty about not having posted anything recently so I managed to unearth a couple of roughs from last winter and have attached them here.

More soon.





Be safe out there.

Add a Comment

I wanted to touch base with everyone and let you know that I have not fallen into a pit somewhere but have in fact been quite busy. On top of the usual client work which I am not allowed to share, until one of these days when it is safe to do so and a ton of it will come spilling out, I have been using every scrap of free time to write and design the graphic novel, mentioned in the previous post, and related story pitch.

For those of you who are interested there will be a lot to see on this front very soon as it all seems to be coming together at once. More news to follow. I will sign off now and wish everyone a peaceful Sunday afternoon.

More soon - a lot more.

Thanks again for your time and patience.

Larry

Add a Comment

Some alternative concept and design ideas for the Raven Witch graphic novel page I posted last week. I had a lot of ideas for that one page and found it difficult to narrow it down to the choices I made. Here are some of the other things I was considering. It looks now like one way or another this book is going to happen, so there are going to be many more choices that will have to be made.

I liked the idea of putting the Twig Pixies under the mushrooms but eventually decided that it might not be right for the gloomy, haunted forest mood I was after. This page got progressively spookier as I worked on it. It seemed to require an ever darkening mood, or at least I became happier with it as the shadows lengthened.







Thanks for stopping by everyone. More soon.

Add a Comment

I have been negotiating back and forth for the last little while with Lombard Editions in Belgium. They do graphic novels such as Tin Tin and many others. One of the editors there thought it might be interesting if I did a graphic novel for them, but in order to properly pitch the idea to the committee, he wanted me to do a sample page. We had been talking about a story with witches so I worked up this page with my old favourite, the Raven Witch.

It is not easy to distill down everything you want to do with a story into one page. I had many ideas to sort through and had to make some choices for better or worse. Below are some of the many roughs I did looking for the best way to tell this little bit of atmospheric mood setting. Will anything come of this - who knows ? For now fingers are crossed.







I'm glad you stopped by. More soon.

Add a Comment

This is an old watercolour from my ill fated first attempt at mailing art out to kid's book publishers. I just found it in a drawer of old art and decided to re-scan it. I still like it - my first tree house.

More soon.

Add a Comment

Well, I just spent the last 10 days painting a book cover picturing a wicked looking troll coming up over a hill with a menacing look on her ugly, troll face and I would love nothing more than to be able to share her with you but, there is an equally wicked and menacing NDA attached to said project which prevents me from doing any such thing. However, while I was painting the aforementioned troll I was also drawing. Drawings whose purpose will become all too clear very shortly, if you're paying attention. For now I will leave you with this bit of sketchbook work and the promise that there will be more following very soon, and with any luck much, much more after that, but lets not get ahead of ourselves.



Thanks so much for stopping by. I always enjoy seeing you.

More soon.

Add a Comment