By: Paula Becker,
on 12/13/2007
This past summer and fall, when I had many-a client project going on, one of them was this Chrismas card, which I call “Snow Elvis” (or “Elvis the Snowman”). This was the final version of the card. I don’t know about you, but I preferred the rough version (below the card) which shows SnowElvis counting it down. But that wasn’t picked in the end. And so it goes. : )
By: Paula Becker,
on 12/12/2007
(a larger version is here.)
I’ve been doing a lot of elves for my warm up drawings. I think it’s the noses. Sometimes my characters have noses like that and they’re not elves. Here, they can get away.
By: Paula Becker,
on 12/5/2007
I’ve got a spread in this December’s issue of HighLights magazine for children which I’ll share with ya. “Not Another Candy Cane!” is a story about a little girl who doesn’t like candy canes much, but she keeps acquiring them from others who give them to her as gifts. It dawns on her that giving them away to other people would get them off her hands, so she does. On Christmas morning, however, she finds a candy cane in her stocking. Just when she thought they were all gone, you know. I like candy canes, by the way. Crumbled up in peppermint bark…Oh, yum!
The spread:
I like doing spot drawings. While working on this I used the spread as a template to work out the spots in the spaces provided. I also debated about how tight or loose to be with this assignment, with loose winning out. Another thing that I did was to use one of the oil brushes in Painter X to make a smeary background for the line work. I liked the effects of the mixed colors and loose paint. You can see that better in the closeups, below, included with roughs.
The little girl’s dog was fun to incorporate throughout these spots. He wanted the candy canes himself, you see. Each time one was given away, he looked on in disbelief. Poor puppy!
(All images copyright HighLights magazine.)
By: Paula Becker,
on 12/4/2007
A very quick sketch to warm up my little fingers after taking a brief walk into the village and to the grocery store. Quite a snow dump in these parts! I had to climb a few snow banks to get through that pathway you see me headed for, there.
I’ve gotten pretty excited about a new bakery/patisserie that opened up last week in the village: Les Moulins LaFayette. I’ve been in twice since they opened this past Thursday just to sniff around, but haven’t bought anything yet (I’m a food-lurker). So, finally… a cafe/coffee shop to go to when I need a break or want to work somewhere besides the studio. Now all I need is a laptop and portable tablet and I’m good to go. Hear that, Santa…?
By: Paula Becker,
on 12/2/2007
The details kind of get lost in the the size here. If you want to view a larger version where you can appreciate all the furry, little faces, please click here. Oh, and, having that many kitties wouldn’t really be excessive…to me. : )
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/30/2007
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/29/2007
“Cold as a fish”. What does that mean? Why a fish and not some artic creature like a polar bear? I’ve never seen a fish that acts rude or cold in that sense. Indifferent, maybe, but cold?
Just another warm up drawing, though quite late in the day!
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/28/2007
Sheep were on my mind after posting the magazine spread so I used them as the subject of a warm-up sketch this morning. Winter was also in the forefront of thoughts (Finally the sun is out. Whoopee…), so sheep wearing winter-wear. And Bigelow’s Cherry Vanilla tea. A Bigelow employee left a nice comment on yesterday’s posting in regards to my dismay over hearing about the discontinuation of my now favorite flavor. I had sent them an email after reading this posting (See? I’m not the only one!) to let them know how I felt about it. Very nice to get such a personal reply! A crate of Cherry Vanilla tea might make me feel better, too. : )
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/27/2007
Just a warm up drawing to get me started today. Looks like winter is on my mind. I’m sipping on a hot mug of Bigelow’s Cherry Vanilla Tea while sketching this. With milk and sugar, it’s good stuff.
Darn. I see the Cherry Vanilla is discontinued by Bigelow. Great.
And for those interested in how a book for someone like Scholastic is put together, Doug (”Dougmo”) Jones has a posting on how he goes about it. Thanks for the insight, Doug!
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/26/2007
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/20/2007
Have a great Thanksgiving, U.S of A.! (See a larger version here.)
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/18/2007
I posted a version here where the kitty is swishing his tail. I decied I’d prefer the tail was hanging down and not moving, so put the altered version up here. Here’s an enlarged version, too, if one wants to see more detail.
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/15/2007
All my attempts to write a poem for this were…not good. Something quick and simple will have to suffice this time-around.
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/8/2007
Ah, fun. I doubt I’m the only one feeling it in these parts. It’s been over-cast and cold all week long, and I’ve just felt a tad bit…blue (I don’t like it that it gets dark at 4:45 p.m. now. Come late December it’ll be dark by 4:15. Blah). It could be partly because my husband is gone on a long business trip; or it could be the merry-go-round of constant work has slowed down. Probably a combination of all the above, would be my guess. I’m not altogether sure what to do about it, so I did a quick drawing to vent some of the emotions I’ve been feeling.
And I’ve had some time to tackle projects around the house, as I mentioned in an earlier post. I’ve got a few boxes and baskets of old video tapes that I’ve not looked at in years and I didn’t want to toss them without knowing what’s on them so I’ve been spending some time each evening with them and the VCR. So far I’ve watched a tape from 1993 which has on a local news telecast and the finale of M.A.S.H. I had completely forgot how the series ended so it was like watching it anew. I think I probably enjoyed it more when it originally aired because, this time around, I felt I lacked that emotional momentum that would make the characters endearing as they said their farewells. After the MASH episode, I apparently taped some show called, “Tough Guys”. It might be a movie (edited in to say: Yes, it’s a movie) but I did watch the lead in and it had the look of a TV show. I may give it a whirl at some point in the dead of winter, when I’m desperate.
At lunch today, I tried another tape. This one has old “The Waltons” episodes. Call me what you will, but I always liked that show. This was from season one, called, “The Literary Man”, about John Boy meeting a writer who gives him advice on how to ‘be’ a writer. It was the perfect accompaniment for my lunch of roast beef and vegetables.
Oh, I meant to mention the commercials. Even more entertaining than the shows. $1600 would get you a 486 computer with 4 honking megabytes of ram, with a dot matrix printer thrown in. I remember having one of those. And the fashions. Were we still wearing shoulder padded suits and big hair in ‘93? Of course, this was taped in Texas, ALWAYS the land of “big har”.
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/7/2007
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/2/2007
Wow. It feels strange to suddenly not have deadlines looming, one after the other. I just finished up a number of client projects, working full-steam (since early August, really), with these last few weeks being particularly heavy with deadlines. But the last went out today and I have a bit of breathing room to, oh, look at the piles of stuff that have been waiting for me. I see a stack of papers piled up on my printer that need filing, a studio that needs a major purging of ’stuff’, a website that needs overhauling, marketing that needs to be organized and put on the front burner now, as well as taking a look at getting updated on my books for taxes and in general. So there’s always something to do. LOTS to do.
But today, this afternoon, I say the piles can wait (I don’t think I can mentally tackle them right now, anyway). I’m catching up with blog postings. So I’ve been on our Illustration For Kids blog and posted our fall postcard promo, and to the Picture Bookies Showcase blog to put up an “Artist’s Choice” piece. And on this blog, I’m going to put up a sample spot I did for a recent spread for Chirp magazine. I posted the spread here, and chose one of the spots below to share.
Below: My client sent me the manuscript and asked me to do the layout. It was okay to do really rough, sketchy version–even use stick figures– of the piece, as the idea at this point was to just figure out how to translate the story into some sort of graphic form. I think that’s a clock in the upper-right there.
Below: Once the layout was approved, I did a tighter rough of each spot. Not much changed from the sketch to the roughs, really, other than flushing out the idea. Here I’m getting the characters down, how they should look, the line work I want, the colors, etc. The clock disappeared.
Below: The final and finished spot for the spread. The background color changed dramatically. I opted to give it more of an ‘inside’ setting (a cave or something). Also, in the rough, the dad dinosaur wasn’t at the table originally and I wanted to have him sitting down with the other two, so I adjusted for his being there. I wish I’d kept the mom’s napkin, but she’s now got her hand in a “What..??!” kind of pose. The young dinosaur’s eyes are closed now too. He’s doing that consistently in the spread as to me it conveys he’s sort of obliviously lost in his appetite for the dandelions.
(c) Chirp
By: Paula Becker,
on 11/1/2007
A day late, as October 31st is Reformation Day on some church calendars. It marks the day in 1517 when Martin Luther nailed a list of 95 grievances against the Church of Rome (Catholic church) on the doors of a church in Wittenberg, Germany. I suppose if he was complaining about the food served in the monk’s cafeteria or something, it wouldn’t have caused such a stir, but they were pertaining to the then church’s doctrines and practices, and “they” didn’t take too kindly to that. The story goes on from there, with the grievances sparking the Protestant Reformation. So I used this subject for a quick warm-up sketch, posted below. I couldn’t decide whether to keep the background as a vignette or bleed it off the edges. I like ‘em both, so I’ll post them both.
Oops…I seemed to have misspelled “Wittenberg”…
By: Paula Becker,
on 10/30/2007
(Larger version here.)
So I betcha didn’t know that all those Pumpkins that are being hollowed out for Jack 0′ lanterns are going to come back and seek revenge, did ya? Yep, it’s true. There’s a window of time around the midnight hour for them to come to “life” and come after you people who gutted and carved them up. Tit for tat; an eye for an eye; a head for a head. You get the idea (and I’ve given you a glimpse, above). S0 you’ve just been lucky up til now, but if you keep up this macabre ritual, your head may just roll one night.
Awe, I’m just making that up, but it sounds good, doesn’t it?
These Halloweeny themes give me a chance to mess around with a darker palette, as well as darker imagery. But I’m a humorous illustrator/cartoonist so I can only take gruesome so far. Which is fine by me.
By: Paula Becker,
on 10/30/2007
illustrator Penelope Dullaghan (the founder of Illustration Friday) has her annual Halloween contest/exhibit up and running. The theme and title this year is “Monster Mash”, with participants creating an image (be it two or three-dimensional) of–or featuring–a monster/monsters. My submission is posted below. There’s presently quite a variety of styles and ideas from submitters, so check it out, or better yet, participate! Yeeeah!
By: Paula Becker,
on 10/25/2007
(Larger version here.)
By: Paula Becker,
on 10/11/2007
I can post more often if I post things like this–bits and pieces of what I’m working on. So…Dipping my hand into the pile of roughs here, out comes…. this. These are two of the rejected rough ideas I sent to a greeting card client for the theme of someone employed getting a new (supposedly better) job. They did pick one idea which I’ll work up for print.
By: Paula Becker,
on 10/10/2007
(A larger version can be seen here.)
I know I’ve been lagging on posting lately. When I’ve got a lot of deadlines I can be somewhat myopic. I have to limit my internet activity a lot as it can be quite distracting. But it’s become such a habit to do the Illustration Friday illos ever week, I pretty much consider it a job. So here’s my contribution to the theme of “open”. If it makes just one person smile, I’m good with that. : )
By: Paula Becker,
on 10/8/2007
By: Paula Becker,
on 10/3/2007
The Chicken Coop-blues, I guess. Larger versions can be seen here, here, and here.
By: Paula Becker,
on 9/24/2007
(A larger version is here.)
I’m a slow blogger these days. A lot of work and deadlines have me putting more energy in that direction lately. And I’ve just not been able to get back on the blogging horse since coming back from vacation. But IF is alway good for a warm-up drawing, hence the “Vivian” poem. I hope you like it and thanks for coming by to take a look-see!
You’ve really captured the Elvis spirit in snow. I love both cards!
Brilliant play on words! It’s such a clever idea and the snowman looks so funny with that hairdo.
Your snowman is merry, but the chickens on your banner will bring me back for more! great drawings.
Great Elvis snowman!
Thanks, you guys! I’m glad you like him. And, Emily…I’m fond of that chicken drawing, too. Hildy (that’s the name of the chicken) was a fun character to draw.