Stories and pirates. One begins as another finishes

I'm currently on a pirate fix. This one is still in progress.




But the one below here is completed just recently. That makes 2 pages of a Children's book that I have completed. I have more sketches to work on and then I should bundle it into a book dummy and send it out to some publishers.



One page closes as another ends. Progress is never ending. Keep drawing!

Pirate!

While I'm sorting out the final details of the storybook illustration I finished I wanted to start on a secondary illustration.



This pirate has just climbed aboard another ship and is about to do his job. Create havoc to an enemy pirate ship. Anyway, this image is all sketched out. It'll be painted in photoshop in the coming week or 2. The idea with it is to turn it into a birthday greeting card. This would be the front side, and then the inside fold would be an image of a small kid with baggy pirate clothes on with words to tie it together.

On a minor note, I'm still waiting to hear back from the Limkokwing University of Creative Technologies which I applied to school for. It would be an Advanced Diploma in Education. The best part? The school is in Malaysia, which I can't wait to get back to. Why? Because my Girlfriend lives there. And its also a very beautiful country. Hopefully they respond back soon.

Another page Painted

As I finish another page of the book (with added text soon to come) I feel like I'm starting to make some progress. There's still a long ways to go before its ready for a book dummy stage. But at least we're getting somewhere. The characters are coming to life finally. Keep Creating!

Detail of page 14

The above image is a detail of the story book page that i'm working on. It's nearing completion. This is a very close up image of the full page. Almost done with this illustration. Its been great creating it from the start.

Mish-Mash on a Wednesday

Now, the above image is the now-final image for one of the book pages I'm working on. I made some minor adjustments based on some input I was given, and I think it made for a much stronger illustration.




And this image of the leaves I'm showing to display one of my recent happy accidents. I was working on a different illustration and making a pattern/texture. I wanted to save the specific work on a separate file, and in doing so I changed the canvas size and this was the end result. So I wanted to just go ahead and post it.

Start of a New Page

The above image is the next full-color page that I have started working on for my Children's book project. I'm still changing some finishing touches with the previous page with the dragon silhouette, but I like to keep my ideas rolling. Not much time for rest in the life of an illustrator. The image was inked with Micron black pen simply because i don't have a scanner thats big enough to take in the full photo. This was so that I could still see all of the details when I begin to paint the image in photoshop. I'll post more photos of my work later on.

Finished page

Thanks to my good friend Sean McManus for giving me some pointers with the design aspect! Here's what I would call a finished page to a children's book. Lots more pages to sketch up and at least 1 more to fully color still.

1st draft

Here's a first draft of the children's book page that I've been working on. Anybody who wants to give me critiques feel free. In fact I encourage it.

Other than this I've recently been drawing a few sketches of horses. Just a couple that I've drawn...

Book page Progress

Life is rough so my progress has been slow. I've gone through more stress than I would have liked to live through. I'm still working on this page, but its getting closer to being done.

Pg. 5, Still Alive

I'm still alive. Here's some work I've been hacking away at slowly.

Here We Are

Ok. So its been about a month and a half since I posted. Wow. I've been busy with a new job and getting my life together. I know. No excuses.

I've been tinkering away with a few things here and there. Trying to get my mind organized basically. Here's some a character that I've been working on for a while. I'm doing 1 more color test and then I'll be able to post a color test sheet of the character to the blog.

Until next time (hopefully not another month), keep on drawing and painting!

Practicing Scenery

So I'm trying to figure things out. What my strengths and weaknesses are. Mostly focusing on trying to strengthen my weaknesses at the moment. And I've boiled it down to the fact that I need to get better at creating and drawing/painting scenery. Landscapes, Cityscapes, interior settings, and what have you. As of now I've completed just a few sketches of some outdoor settings, pictures that I found on the internet. After a few of these I'm going to start painting 1 or 2 of them because I certainly need some practice in that as well. I found for me that doing a bunch of gesture sketches of the human figure helped me understand the human figure a bit, and I tried to apply it in a sense to drawing scenery. I haven't gotten into the full gesture drawing, maybe I won't i don't know yet, but doing smaller sketches that include detail but not all of the tiny details helps to at least get a feel and understanding of how scenery is made up. Below are the rest of the sketches I have so far.