the evolution of the leia and luke paintings

These paintings started as drawings in my sketchbook that I did for fun last fall. I liked how the sketches turned out, so I decided to paint them.

The idea was to do my version of classic portraits of the actors from the original Star Wars movies as if they were nobility from the renaissance. I really liked the idea of combining finished, rendered faces with graphite line drawings of ornate frames.

making friends - chirp magazine

I wanted to share some of my process for the 4 illustrations that I did in the March issue of Chirp Magazine.

My initial sketches were pretty rough but once I had worked out how the illustrations would look, I did tighter sketches to show the art director.

The feed back from the art director lead to some small changes, the most noticeable one being the setting of the fourth illustration. I made the changes, added more details, and then submitted a new sketch.

The sketch was approved so I started painting, working on all 4 illustrations at the same time.

Here's the final art:

family portrait commission - final art (3 of 3)

family portrait - painting progress (2 of 3)

Stay tuned for the final art tomorrow!

family portrait commission - sketches (1 of 3)

Here are some of the preliminary sketches for a family portrait that I worked on last fall...

Tomorrow I'll post some progress shots of the final painting as it came together.

marshmallow soup (2 of 2)

When the art director for Ladybug magazine contacted me about doing an illustration for them, she was looking for a very specific image. She wanted a little boy in a chef's hat and apron dropping marshmallows into a cup of hot chocolate.  

I began by doing sketches of little boys' faces.  Once I had one that I was happy with, I played around with different compositions, keeping in mind that there needed to be a space for the text.  The art director initially wanted a full body view of the little boy, but after trying a few different compositions, I found that a close up of his upper body and face worked best.  She agreed.

washing the body

I was contacted by the art director at Alberta Views Magazine back in July about doing an illustration for an essay called 'Washing the Body: I carry my mother inside me now as she once carried me' by Karen Connelly. It was about a woman's experience of losing her mother. Because I'd been doing a lot of work for the children's market, I was really excited to tackle such a different subject matter. The article was beautifully written and very moving.  I really wanted to honor such a lovely article with an image that would do it justice, something simple and thought provoking.

The title of the article makes reference to pregnancy and there's a part that talks about the similarities between the "work of dying and the labour of birth." I found the comparison to be really interesting and that's what I focused my sketches on. I wanted to find a way to show life and death in a single image.

I ended up with a few ideas that I felt had potential, but none that were quite 'there' yet. I submitted five sketches to the art director and she gave me excellent feedback.

She thought that the bottom image that showed the actual washing expressed what the article was really about and that by incorporating some of the ideas in my other sketches and by doing something with the background, I could add some subtle layers of meaning.

I took some photo reference so that I could get the hands just right and then looked to the article for imagery relating to the mother's memories for the background.

The article makes reference to the Bow River quite a bit in the mother's childhood memories and then it's where her ashes are scattered at the end. A river is also a great metaphor for infinity as well as for letting go so I really wanted to incorporate it. I noticed that a top view of the Bow River lightly mimicked the placement of the arms in my drawing so I tried to work with that. The article also mentions the Center Street Bridge and the lions that guard it so I tried to work those elements into the background.

But I still wasn't satisfied with the result. It was all too literal.

 

I sent my sketch to the art director and got very thoughtful feedback that sent me into a direction that I felt really good about. Gardens and gardening is something that comes up several times in the article and despite it also being an obvious visual when dealing with the subject of death, I decided to use floral elements in the background. I wanted to hint at the idea of life and death by having some of them in colour and some of them in shades of grey. I also thought it would make for an interesting visual. It would have been nice to keep the river element, but I couldn't find a way to incorporate it without it making the image too busy.

Some floral experiments from my sketchbook:

 

The final image in process: 

 

The finished illustration:

The illustration in context:

the cover for Bye, Bye, Butterflies!

I just received an e-mail containing the final cover of my soon-to-be-released picture book, Bye, Bye, Butterflies! and I thought it would be a good time to share the process behind that cover.


I felt that the cover needed to show the main character, Charlie, interacting with butterflies and I had some initial ideas of how that that could go.

My editor liked the idea of the butterfly on Charlie's hand because it also looked like Charlie was waving.

Because I had some ideas about how I wanted to do the background, I painted Charlie and the butterfly separately so that I could experiment without overworking my painting and then combine the 2 layers (foreground and background) digitally.

My initial vision involved a chaotic cloud of butterflies.  I thought it would look really good to have the title of the book in white type on top of the chaos.

However, once the image was painted, I realized that my idea wasn't working so I simplified the background.  I really enjoyed all the experimentation with butterflies and patterns that I did at this stage.

It still wasn't working so I simplified it some more.

And then some more.

At this stage my first thought was that we could have the title of the book arc across the top.  However, it still wasn't looking right.  My editor suggested that I try adding a banner that the title could sit on and I loved that idea.  Here were a couple mock ups:

We agreed on the second version, so I painted the banner and then added red stripes to Charlie's shirt to bring more color into the image.

I sent just the artwork to my publisher and this is one of the earlier mock ups that the designer came up with:

At this time, my original paintings were being properly scanned and color corrected.  When I got the scans back I made a few small changes and this is what the final cover art looked like:

And this is what the final front and back cover design looks like: