Illustration: Leaf

 

Another leaf drawing. Have not done one in a while, haven't drawn much in a while! I just wanted to draw something and also to use Krita again. I am definitely out of practice. 

Illustration: Parc La Fountaine septembre 2025

 

I finally had a day to work on my own stuff for once and managed to get this digital painting done. It's mostly gouache brushes and a couple texture brushes. The last was an isolated tree and this is an entire scene so it was more challenging in that respect. It's still loose compared to my other work but it took about 8 hours of work to do. The forground path still looks wonky even after repainting it a few times. My main focus was the blurred/ditorted reflection on the water as I didn't want to have it look like a mirror. 

Illustration: arbe automne 01

 

Hopefully, I will do more of this practice work and get some of my painting skills up. This mostly watercolour brushes in Procreate and I hope is looser and more spontaneous looking than my usual stuff. I went to the park for ideas, took some reference photos and want to make a small series just for th hell of doing it. 

Illustration: Morning Clouds

 So this is a nothing painting really. it is sort of something that would be the background of a more complex painting normally. I was walking the dog and the sun was rising and there clouds were interesting to me me so I decided to paint them in Procreate, very free form and loose - a word never associated with my art! 

Welcome to Night Vale quote project

This quote hit me right and I thought it would be interesting to make a poster of sorts out of it. Since much of my design is dictated by my client's look and feel I don't often get to try new things. I did try and keep it in keeping with the Welcome to Night vale flavour and spent a little time making sure the logo was close enough.

New Character - Weasel (belette)

So I did this fairly quickly once I started working on in C4D after a couple months of knocking it around in my head. I have no idea what sort of character he is yet, like the fox Renarldo I made a while back I'd like to incorporate the french word belette (weasel) into his name as renard is fox in french. I have ideas how he will move around etc... just no idea sort of project he will be running around in.

I gave him fur like Charles Billingsworth the 3rd, the platypus in my Dramatic Reading series using the same sort of set up for that so it renders fast and helps give him some depth, I think. Not sure if he should have some sort of clothing or accessories yet. After I decide on that I can start rigging him for animation.

UPDATE:

I worked more on his fur and gave him some black hair on his tail, plus made his eyes smaller and the pupils larger. I actually made a new set of eyes that work completely differently to get more expression in them. I am also almost done with his face and eye expressions. Over the next few days I should have his rigging done and maybe do a little animation test. 

Design Project; Book jackets

It is no secret my work load has been say... reduced over the last year. Getting new contracts has been near impossible despite some very successful projects in the recent past. I guess a well reviewed design for a book and a nomination for an international Emmy don't really carry much weight these days... at least where I am concerned.

I have been taking up the slack by working on my personal projects, mostly animations. That is fine but I need to keep my design work up as well so I've decided to look trough my personal home library and redesign book jackets for a few of the hardcovers I have. 

So I am going to post my results, experiments and ideas here and hope to get some feedback to keep me on my toes with my graphic design work. My plan is use mostly design techniques but I might also try illustrating a few myself - depending on the book. I will try different styles and looks for each book and maybe even several for each book as I go along.

If I can get money to print these up, I plan to use them in my book collection.

Please: click the images to enlarge to see them in detail.

Frankenstein

I actually did this one before, I think with Pagestream on my Amiga many years ago. I love the Bernie Wrightson illusions for this book and used this one on the old jacket as well. Originally I liked  the stark white over the textured backdrop, but settled (for now) on an old wet plate texture from the days when photo negatives were on glass. I also tried a version with no cover image.

Dracula

I read this books every few years over again and researched 100s of other covers - many of which I found pretty terrible. Again I like a clean look and white as a backdrop would also work for this I think. The skull with wings is a royalty free graphic I slightly changed and I chose a font that was not overly decorative. The blood splatter was something I though I should avoid but then thought this needed little more excitement added. 

Just for fun and practice

a little rude but it's a joke between Yvon and us.

Pour une blague, j'ai décidé pour faire une copie du générique de téléséries... "Grande Ourse". Je n'ai pas très content avec les résultants. Quelques transitions n'ont pas très subtile.