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Last weekend my charming assistant/husband helped me film this time-lapse video of yours truly painting a watercolor landscape. He also edited and produced it for me. Thanks, Jonathan! This is my first attempt at filming and isn’t my best landscape ever (the composition could be better) but it shows my painting technique and it’s (hopefully) interesting to watch it all come together. And without further ado, a painting from start to finish:

For the curious, pigments include:

Payne’s Gray, French Ultramarine, Prussian Blue, Sap Green, Quinacridone Gold, Yellow Ochre, Pyrrole Red Light, and a touch of Quinacridone Magenta, probably some other stuff.

Brushes:

Synthetic 1″ flat, Winsor & Newton sable flats in 1/2″ and 3/4,” Raphael Sable round #4, Winsor & Newton rigger

Paper:

Hahnemuhle “Turner” watercolor block, 24×32 cm

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Hello, dear readers! Today I have a mishmash of a post to share with you, so I hope you’ll bear with me. (Ha.)

I have been on a bit of a quest lately to loosen up my technique. If you also struggle with this, know that you are not alone. It takes an enormous amount of practice to get the “quick and effortless” look instead of the “catastrophic disaster” look, so we watercolorists often get very tight and controlled in order to compensate. Of course, there are many different ways to work with watercolor and some artists do the “controlled” thing extremely well, but if you’re looking to loosen up, here are a few techniques I’ve stolen from other artists over the years that I’ve found helpful:

• Using brushes that are much larger than I find comfortable
• Minimizing the number of washes. The entire background of this image was one big, wet wash, not twenty-seven separate washes detailing every single leaf and bush
• Using a lot more water and paint than seems reasonable; enough that I often end up having rivulets of liquid draining off the paper
• Getting to know the paint. Many colors lighten in value or lose saturation when they dry, so it needs to be even darker than you think when you paint it on
• Waiting for a wet-on-wet wash to completely dry before moving on to add details
• Varying textures. I used some dry brush technique in the trees to simulate pine needles
• Painting lots of really bad paintings that will never, ever see the light of day. I plan to burn these so that no one can accidentally find them when I die
• Working as fast as I possibly can
• Occasionally closing my eyes. (Just kidding! Or not…?)

I hope those help someone out there just as they helped me!

In other news, copies of The Story I’ll Tell are here, so I can also do that second giveaway that I promised you several weeks ago.

Leave a comment below if you’d like a chance to win a signed book! I’ll announce the winner next Wednesday.

 

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Since this is Halloween Week, I thought how better to celebrate than exploring the intricately detailed work of Cursed Pirate Girl creator Jeremy Bastian! A graduate of The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Bastian spent his years studying the works of the great engraving art masters and old time book illustrators. One of the inspirations for Cursed Pirate Girl was a children’s book called The Ship’s Cat, featuring illustrations by Alan Aldridge. It takes about a week for Jeremy Bastian to draw one page of Cursed Pirate Girl. Each page is meticulously packed with the smallest details; it’s fun to just stare at a page and let your eyes wander. You can read about Jeremy’s art process on this blog post here.

Cursed Pirate Girl follows the title character’s search for her Pirate Captain father on the mythical Omerta Seas, encountering many strange and wondrous creatures along the way. The first 3 issues were published by Olympian Publishing and are now highly sought after collector’s items. Much bigger publisher Archaia/BOOM has taken over on Cursed Pirate Girl and if you’re quick enough, you might still be able to find a copy of Cursed Pirate Girl 2015 Annual(52 pages), which hit stands this month. The plan is to do 2 more yearly specials to complete the 6 part story, but there could be more material set in the Cursed Pirate Girl world after that.

If you want to get the latest news on Jeremy Bastian & Cursed Pirate Girl, fell free to follow him on Twitter here!

For more comics related art, you can follow me on my website comicstavern.com – Andy Yates

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Summary: This blog post covers a book project that I worked on from the end of 2014 to the beginning of 2105. I was hired to create a cover illustration and a number of black and white interior illustrations for the book The Hole Story of Kirby the Sneak and Arlo the True.

via Studio Bowes Art Blog at http://ift.tt/1h8AfKg

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Illustration Friday Editor and Creative Director Thomas James shares his process for generating ideas for illustration projects. Send us your own process here.

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Hello fellow illustrators!

 

As promised last Friday, we are now in full effect taking Illustration Friday to the next level. The natural evolution of a fun weekly illustration challenge based on ideas is a deeper focus on the art of idea generation itself.

Yesterday we shared a stream of conciousness word list for this week’s topic of POINTY, and today we’re sharing some visual inspiration based on a simple image search using some of the words from that list. Use can use the images above to brainstorm for concepts that you might not have considered otherwise, or do some searching of your own!

Have fun!

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In our continuing effort to keep you inspired we’d like to tell you about this really fun online course that will walk you through the steps necessary to take your character illustrations to the next level.

In this class Matt Kaufenberg will take you through his process of illustrating a character, starting with the concept, then moving into Illustrator to create the shapes, and finally, rendering it in Photoshop.

What You’ll Learn

• Finding Inspiration
• Character Concepts
• Building the Foundation in Illustrator
• Rendering in Photoshop
• Color Adjustment and Texture

Click here to learn more about this class >>

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In a very useful post on his blog, Illustrator Magoz shares his step-by-step process of creating an illustration using Photoshop. It’s always helpful to see how a fellow artist approaches their craft, even when you already have your own methods in place, because you never know what little tricks you might pick up.

Read the post here.

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Are you a designer, illustrator or creative doodler? Have you ever wondered how you could turn your talents into a business? This three-day workshop will help you create a plan for leveraging your creativity into a successful freelance business.

Run by Sally S. Swindell and Nate Padavick (illustrators and co-founders of They Draw and Cook) this course will give you an inside look at how two artists have built a successful design & illustration studio by fostering a community of artists that empower each other to grow their businesses.

Join Salli and Nate for (3) hour-long sessions to learn how you can leverage community & online content to build a successful freelance business around your creative skills.

Click here for more info >>

 

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Have you ever wanted to make seamless repeating patterns but didn’t know how to or tried and found it too difficult? Well now you can with PatternPress for Photoshop.
PatternPress makes the process of creating seamless patterns easy and also adds a heap of extra touches to make them look even more amazing!Click here to see a great video demo and learn how to get started making quick and easy seamless patterns!

 

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If you’re a digital illustrator seeking a way to make work that looks handmade, you simply MUST check out this huge collection of digital brushes and tools from the great Nicky Laatz!

Equipped with just this pack – you will be an unstoppable watercolour design machine…without even picking up a paint brush :)

Get the pack here!

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Jack be nimble,
Jack be quick,
Jack jump over
the candlestick. 

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Different approach with this book. Working up the drawings in charcoal (digital) and layering in color. The designer and I were looking for a jewel tone range of soft colors. Takes a fair amount of restraint not to just rush in and try to paint over things but seems to be working!

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It’s easy to presume that your doodles, illustrations, paintings and creative thoughts should make their way straight to paper or canvas although just for a minute why not think outside the box.  Break the rules and do something creatively different that sets your doodles apart , not to abandon your sketchbook for to long but challenge yourself to something different. To help get you started heres just a few creative ways you can do that and truly think outside the box to show others just how creative you can be.

• Remember that rather dull phone or tablet case you bought thats lacking a certain creative omph, well grab yourself some paint or a paint based marker and create your own custom case design.  Add your own style and choose your own theme to make a stylish creative case you’d want to show off and not hide.
• Mugs are great because they often get filled with heart warming teas or beverages although a plain little old mug is some what sad and gloomy. However with some ceramic paint or markers you  could give it an unique handdrawn design of its own that is sure to make your tea breaks even better.
• For fellow lovers of fabric the dream is no doubt to create your own and you can even without a huge fabric printer. With some acrylic paints and fabric medium you can paint your own designs onto calico, making reams of your own one of a kind design to embellish any type of project from home furnishings to wallart and more.
• That little pair of converse you happen to have sitting in the hallway could use a splash of ink wouldn’t you say? Grab yourself some pens and markers ( ones that work well on canvas fabric and will not run) and create yourself a fashion piece that will set you apart from everyone else.

Image by artist  Jaco Haasbroek  you can find out more about their work here.

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Last week we were spending a creative sunday discovering ways you can have fun filling the pages of your sketchbook.  No doubt by now those exact same pages are filled with the seeds of a great creative project , now all you have to do is take those initial sketchbook ideas and turn them into something creatively amazing and here’s ways following last week’s post you can do that.

1.  From a continuous fine liner doodle look at what you’ve created. Is there are character or motif on your page that you can trace on layout paper turning it into a developed illustration piece. Could you grow that initial idea; add extra aspects to it that weren’t there before and develop it into something new that might be a great addition to your portfolio.

2.  What was once a spontaneous splash on your page might now be an amazing initial illustration idea all dried up and ready for developing. You might have a series of quirky inky characters, imaginative creatures and more that you can now scan and turn into anything from a surface pattern to a series of illustrative prints.

3. Were you brave enough to rip a hole in your sketchbook page? If you were and grew a little illustration into a bigger one, growing a concept for a story or filling it with typography script, you could now scan and digitally colour your pieces turning them into a book or series of prints for an online shop.

4. If you dabbled in paper collage and created a sketched paper piece, you could take elements from your experimentation that worked and move them further in your project. So for example if a black fine line doodle contrasted better on graph paper collage, then use those elements that work along with your drawing theme of choice to develop further turning initial sketchbook ideas into a series of framed pieces maybe?

5. The last sketchbook filling idea was to find one thing where you were and sketch it in different ways, materials and perspectives on your pages to create a number of motifs. Once you’ve done this you could retrace your sketches onto tracing paper to tidy up the best designs you want to use. Then begin incorporating colour and combine shapes to make new pattern prints that could be for many different things from phone cases to notebook covers, fabric and more.

Image by artist Sarah Ahearn you can find out more about her work here.

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There’s nothing better to get a new creative project started than by making  your own inspirational mood board.  Creating your own mood board of idea’s and inspiration will help you to build a collection of concept base ideas to build a new art piece from whether a series of illustrations, photographs or painting. It’s not all that hard to do and once you get started creating a mood board can actually be a really enjoyable part of project building,  although if you’ve not made one before here are afew easy tips to help you get started on making your own.

What do I put in a mood board?

A mood board can contain anything from doodles, words, photographs, textures , colour swatches, fabrics and much more based around a chosen theme for your project. So for example a theme maybe “ocean” to which you’d include images of its inhabitants , sea blue colour tones and meaningful words tied to the theme etc.

What do I need to make one ? 

Its really down to personal preference but you can make a mood board easily in anything from the pages in your sketchbook, sticking them to a piece of artboard or a cork board with pins. There’s really no right or wrong way because your mood board is personal, there to give you idea’s and pull together concepts for your project that will help it grow.

Putting a mood board together.

1. To begin putting your creative mood board together collect a series of images and inspirational materials linked to your chosen theme.
2. On an a3 blank sketchbook page ( or any page size of your preference but bigger is less limiting to your mood board ideas) begin to add your mood board research to your page.
3. Stick bits down with patterned washi tape or masking tape to make it more visual and allow you to change things around.
4. Make it personal and have fun.
5. Keep your creative mood board  in sight throughout your project to stay visually inspired and consistant to your project theme to prevent getting creatively lost along the way.

Image by  illustrator Katt Frank  you can find out more about their work here .

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The only way to be a writer is to write, right? This is the advice we give at WD, online and in the magazine. If you want to write, you must write. But sometimes getting started is difficult. Perhaps you have a fully-formed character but no idea what to do with him. Maybe your idea is a great plot, but you don’t know who the woman who must live it will be. I would argue that getting started—the actual act of sitting down and beginning something new—is the most difficult part of writing. (Your mileage may vary, of course, but for me, this is the hard part.)

Imagine my excitement this morning when I encountered the following paragraph as I read That Would Make a Good Novel by Lily King on The New York Times:

When I teach fiction I often start a workshop with one of my favorite exercises called Two Truths and a Lie. I tell my students to write the first paragraph of a short story. The first sentence of the paragraph must be true (My sister has brown hair.), the second sentence must be true (Her name is Lisa.), but the third sentence must be a lie (Yesterday she went to prison.). … The lie is the steering wheel, the gearshift and the engine. The lie takes your two true sentences and makes a left turn off road and straight into the woods. It slams the story into fifth gear and guns it.

Although this extremely useful exercise is not at all the point of King’s article, I think it deserves its own post here for those of you who, like me, have trouble with beginnings. So let’s do an exercise! This one is three-pronged:

1. Write the beginning of a story—three full sentences—using the Two Truths and a Lie method. The first two sentences must be true, and the third sentence must be a lie.

2. Carry that story out to at least 500 words. Write more if you’d like. Go wherever your lie takes you. Be ridiculous or be introspective. Whatever suits you.

3. Post your story on your blog, and leave a link here (with a title and your first three sentences to avoid being trapped in our spam filters) so that the rest of us can read it. 

BONUS: Tweet a link to your story, too! Use the hashtag #WD2Truths1Lie so we can all see your efforts.

---

Adrienne Crezo is the managing editor of Writer’s Digest magazine. Follow her on Twitter at @a_crezo.

 

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Mary Kate McDevitt is one of the most successful hand-letterers and illustrators working today. A graduate of Tyler School of Art, Mary went on to work at a design studio in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. After 2 years, she moved out west to pursue a freelance illustration and design career in Portland, Oregon before ultimately settling in Brooklyn, New York, which is where she presently resides. While she previously imagined that she would work as an illustrator, dabbling in some lettering on the side–but it turned out to be quite the opposite. Her ever-growing client list includes Chronicle Books, CMYK Magazine, Fast Company, and the United States Postal Service.

She is specifically inspired by vintage type and techniques, including the ones of her own family. As a teenager, she discovered a plethora of handwritten letters that her mother and aunt wrote to her grandmother during college. She used this inspiration for her Your Handwritten Letters project, a daily hand-lettering exercise. Mary would hand-draw a letter of the alphabet and mail the original to a unique participant each day.

You can follow along with Mary Kate McDevitt on her website, blog, Instagram, Dribbble, and can also purchase prints through her Etsy shop. She also has two online classes on Skillshare that can be found here and here. 

 

 

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In January I gave a series of talk at Kindling Words east and can now share a bit of what I talked about during the breakout sessions with the illustrators. May 27th will mark the release date of Sleepytime Me by Edith Fine, my next book with Random house so it best to focus on this title for this series of posts.

First I need to address the question of why I am using digital tools. Not for myself, but because I am asked...all the time. Technique and materials are really of little interest to me. Photoshop is a tool. Pastels and charcoal are tools. I am more interested in what you create with them. However, the question is always in the air so I will give you the cliff notes version of my thinking on the debate.


I started using photoshop when I began work as a visual development artist working on animated films and have found the program to be an invaluable tool in my book production work. First a quick note to all the skeptics who ask: "Don't you miss traditional materials?"Quick answer: No. While there is a learning curve, I have been able to customize my tools to create a process that not only replicates my traditional technique but removes many of the limitations of working in pastel and acrylic. Here are two examples of work. The one on the left is from my pastel work on the Redwall  picture books, the image on the right is a detail from my book due out at the end of August 2014,  Baking Day at Grandma's by Anika Denise. The image on the right was created using only digital tools.


I am impatient with my art. I work best when I can act and react. With digital tools changing the piece as it begins to emerge is far easier and I can get to the fun stuff faster. The goal is not necessarily to shorten the production time, though in this day  of ever tightening deadlines and shrinking advances this is clearly a very good byproduct. The goal is to get as much of original inspiration down on the page as possible. With digital tools, I can cut right to the chase and then have the flexibility to edit, change, and repaint the piece to suit the needs of the entire book.

In the next post I will focus on the previously time consuming process of creating a bookmap with Photoshop.

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she wishes she had ScrivenerWriters, if you haven't tried Scrivener yet, do. It's so worth the learning curve and (really quite affordable) expense.

Give up the MS Word addiction. Imagine: no more keeping each chapter in a separate file, then having to open fifteen different files when you can't remember quite where That Very Important Thing happened. No more keeping your story outlines on dozens of sticky notes... and then always wondering whether maybe you lost a few that time you worked at the cafe table outside. No more endless bookmark lists and devastation when you can't find that one perfect link you looked at five months ago. 

No, the people who make Scrivener aren't giving me a dime. I just like their product very, very much. 

It's hard to boil down all of the outstanding features of Scrivener, so I'm going to give you my top five:

 

• Being able to have an electronic "corkboard". I plot, and re-plot, my stories out using this. Gone are the days of having a wire stretched across my study with index cards hanging from it. Now I can take my outline anywhere, so long as I have my laptop. And it's super easy to shift elements around, and see how they fit. 
• Storing all of my internet research and references in one place, with subfolders. When I find a website I want to keep, I drag its address into my Scrivener research folders. If I want, I can easily rename it. It's so simple to go back months later and find things. 
• Keeping snapshots of chapters that I'm afraid I'll complete bungle in revision. When I'm about to slash a chapter into ribbons and rebuild it, I often take a "snapshot" that saves all of its text in a nice, neat area. If I have to go back to that snapshot, it's as easy as a push of a button. or I can just copy-and-paste pieces out of my old version. 
• Keywording chapters. I add customer keywords for each of my characters so I can track, at a glance, where they end up in the story (and where I've forgotten them for too long). 
• The support. You can watch great introductory videos, and the developer is super responsive if you contact him through Twitter, too.

 

I use the Mac version, but I know there's now a robust PC version too. There's a free trial available, so why not try it?

I'll bet you a latte you'll never go back to writing your novels in Word.

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When we left off the last post, I had just taped my soaking-wet watercolor paper to a sturdy piece of board and left it to dry. Here’s what happens next in my process.

(If you missed Part 1, you can read it here.)

At this point the paper will stay totally flat, no matter how much water or paint I put on the surface, which will keep the watercolor from pooling in the valleys of warped paper.  I keep a variety of brush sizes available but will often paint an entire painting with only two brushes. My favorite is my trusty Winsor and Newton Series 7 (size 8.) I know these are awfully expensive, but adore this brush. I can paint incredibly fine lines or nice broad strokes with it, and it holds a ton of water. If I ever forget how great it is, I need only use a different brush for a few minutes and I’m quickly reminded. The other brush I’ll commonly use is a sable square wash for covering large areas with washes or gradients.

Sometimes I will pre-mix some color in little glass bowls if I need a lot. The three dishes below have the three main colors I used for the painting: French Ultramarine, Quinacridone Red, and a warm yellow that was a mixture of New Gamboge and Quinacridone Red. I will spend a lot of time testing out different color combinations on small scraps of paper to make sure I have the gamut right. I still keep my full palette handy for extra touches if needed and for color mixing.

Okay, ready for some painting already? Here we go!

I usually start with light colors and work my way to the darker areas, but since large washes are the most dangerous thing to paint (it can easily go awry) I figured it would be best to start with the sky. If I screwed that up, I could start over without having to re-do everything. I turned the board upside-down, since the gradient becomes darker toward the top of the page. Plus, that way the excess paint runs off the board (and not onto the rest of the painting.)

To speed things along, there is the painter’s secret weapon:

I continue blocking in the light colors. The watercolor gets lighter when it dries, something to keep in mind when mixing. Some colors (like Quinacridone Red) lose a bit of saturation as well.

Next I start adding some midtones, to start balancing the value range. I keep

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I spent a long spring break weekend working and re-working a few pages from my dummy book, some of which involved strange perspectives or figures in difficult positions. They were the kind of scenes that eventually make my brain feel like it’s starting to melt. “If the character is standing there,” I think to myself, “and he’s 12 years old, and we’re nearly above him so that we see a fish-eye five-point perspective view, how tall would his 5-year-old sister be next to him? How big would a rabbit be if it were on the other side of the page, and it were slightly raised up on a hill? And how would that foreshortened arm look? What would the light from a flashlight look like, if it were reflecting against that rock? Why am I doing this instead of relaxing outside on a sunny spring weekend?”

In such situations, I turn to the bookshelf beside my desk where I’ve collected a variety of illustration resources over the years, to go back to the basics. My little library is far from complete (I’d still like a good solid resource on complex perspective, but I have yet to find the right book) but here are three of my favorites. Eventually I’ll add more to this list, but if there’s something you’d recommend feel free to add your favorite resources in the comments.

1. Figure Drawing for All it’s Worth, by Andrew Loomis

This is the book I turn to most often and I think it’s safe to say the best resource on my shelf. I have had a .pdf version of this classic for years, since the book was no longer in print, but it was recently republished by the heroic Titan Books in hardcover, and I jumped at the opportunity to buy it. The physical book makes it much easier to flip through and mark pages, and I can see the drawings with much better detail. This is a phenomenal book for learning to draw the figure accurately in all different positions and from different perspectives. Loomis breaks down figure drawing into its simplest building blocks and then adds detail from there. The text is cheery and encouraging, if a little dated (it’s old, so what do  you expect?) If you draw the human figure, you should get this book, period.

 

2. The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expressions, by Gary Faigin

This is a relatively new addition to my shelf. When it arrived I spent the next few days rhapsodizing to anyone who would listen about the incredible mechanics of facial expression, which garnered me some quizzical facial expressions in itself. The book first goes into the facial structure and muscles, then the basics of the six basic human facial expressions (sadness, joy, fear, anger, disgust and surprise.) I found the complex emotions (combinations of the six above) to be particularly interesting. This book is simply great, and I highly recommend it.

 

 

 

3. Imaginative Realism: How to Paint What Doesn’t Exist, by James Gurney

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While researching for a project I stumbled upon some amazing process images of Florentijn Hofman’s work!

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