Illustrations: patates. mettre à jour!

 Updated the look of the cartoon versions of my oldest grand-nephews for future use. The youngest got much better illustrations and I want the older ones to get improved avatars. The little and big potatoes, or the younger and older brother. Maybe I will do thier parents as well and really get myself in trouble. 

Cirru book series for children

Over the last 6 months or more I have been working with authors Danny and Melissa on a series of children's books featuring Cirru the travelling cloud. The books teach young children about colours, shapes and how to count to ten. I not only designed the books but did all the illustrations.

The books are available to buy on Amazon, so buy them and leave a good review, especially for the illustrations! 

Click the title to go to the Amazon page! 

Cirru Counts to Ten

Learning Shapes with Cirru

Learning Colors with Cirru

Illustration: 3 new illustrations for my short story

 As usual, as I started this project I was hating how it was coming out but in the end I am pretty happy with the look of these drawings. I wanted a sort of wood carving look like I see in some old books from over 100 years ago. Simple and heavily relying on a white ink on black paper  style. I placed them in the document and I think they look appropriate for the story and I will likely do another similar project at some point. The next step is to make "Pulled Towards the Sea" into a 3 animation that won't be to influenced by these drawings, I would like ti to be it's own thing. 

Drawing in both Procreate and Affinity photo. I actually did some experimenting with AI art and was not surprised how disappointing it was, even for inspiration. I get that it can be fun t tell the computer to make a picture of something using a few words and then seeing what it does but despite what we see online, in reality the AI art is pretty bad. Photoshop has a different way of using it now it seems, where you can iterate sections of an image and keep fine tuning it, even using your own photos as reference so maybe that could be useful. Much more fun and satisfying to do it yourself! 

Poster Illustration: Beast from 20 000 Fathoms

 I started this a LONG time ago. I spent a moment here and there making the film title and choosing the look for the monster. I am a big Harryhausen fan and this is one of my favourite films of his. I did the title in Affinity Designer, but the rest in Krita. Krita was running slower me this project, not sure why maybe the next update will help that. Like my other posters I am sort of using some ideas from the original posters, like the logos but simplifying the image overall for a cleaner look. The scales and bumps were a challenge and I decided to keep the feet a little clunky looking like the stop motion model they are based on. I toyed with the idea of doing it black and White but decided colour was too much fun. 

illustration: Nathen & Pascal 02

 

I don't know why but this was a long one do paint, about 35 hours. I tried not to obsess over the fingers, toes and ears - things I often work on for hours and hours because they are complicated to get looking right - obviously I did not try all that hard and obsessed anyway. 

Lots of hidden details in this that are only visible close up or in a print. The upper tank top has ridges and I drew them all so the material wouldn't look shiny, as shiny as it would have looked without that texture added. I went for more contrast in the skin tones between the two guys and I think it was successful. Pale skin is harder for me to render than darker skin. I don't know why I picked that colour for the background but I'm glad I did, I think it's nice compliment to the 2 skin tones. 

It might not seem it but this is more "painting like" than many of my previous colour illustrations and the transition between tones is rougher so I might be getting away from my pen and ink level of detail and letting myself work a little looser with paint. I notice it anyway! 

illustrations: Trois femmes influentes Louise brooks, Pam Grier, Nichelle Nicols

A style I wanted to try out. I also wanted to do them all in Affinity Designer  for yer iPad since I am not really familiar with the interface and want to use the iPad pro much more for design, graphics and art over the next year. 

Nothing special about the images really. I don't exactly have access to any of these women to take my own references so I used pretty well known photos but the point wasn't originality but to play with this style of portrait.