AD33 - Building Doctor Foster

This is the third and final nursery rhyme illustration, I am really happy with this one, it might even be my favourite!

The process is very similar to the old lady but there are a few different things that crop up so I will mention them as and when they happen below, but yeah, here is the process for Doctor Foster. 

To start I map out a basic colour swatch so I don't have to colour blind, I had a pretty strong idea about this characters colour scheme before I had even drawn it, I could just visualize these colours. 

Here I am just refining the shapes and making them nice and crisp, it helps that my canvas size is A2, this way my brush sizes can increase and will therefore give me a sharper edge. 

Throwing in background colours and scenery to fill out the image. 

Finalization and adding in shadows and decorative things.

Okay so here is where I make the transition between Sketchbook Pro and Photoshop, and now I am adding a texture layer to the background to enhance it, I wanted to create a dark and murky sky, it is poring down with rain after all.

Here I am adding in a selective texture which will highlight his hair and the church behind him, also the bottom image shows me adding in a heavy texture that will then fit around his jacket. This texture is particular is a little bit special, My mother has finally decided to change the carpet that was on our stairwell for well over 50 years, before she did so I asked If I could borrow a patch of it t scan it. It worked really well! 

Finally I am adding in some light read tints and playing around with the title.

The middle picture shows my first run of the image, I put his name in a textured box and made it slightly opaque although after a short critique with a lecturer I decided to change it to the one below. I prefer this version because the text is really hard to read which I think makes the image's motives a lot more subtle.  

This outcome is my favourite because I think it has a lot of little hidden cameos that suggest his location and the overall colours combined with the selective textures really do it for me.

AD33 - Screen printing the Cat and the Fiddle

This whole process was tedious at first but after a while I became attuned to the techniques. The main reason why I opted for the four colour CMYK option was because I had never done it before and I had always wanted to try it.
Also seeing as this project was based around the study of texture I thought it would be pretty cool to play around with screen prints and get some natural grain effects.

The first time I did a run of screen prints they did not come out as neatly as I had wanted, after consulting Andy we decided that it would be in my best interest to do another run of this image but with a better attention to the small details.

This time Andy showed me how to add in some cardboard edges so that my paper gets held in place whilst I am printing, it also helped me align each page perfectly. This time I also added registration marks so that the alignment would be as close to perfect as it could be.

The image on the far right was one of my first attempts at the image, as you can see is was very washed out and the colours were not true to the original image, my printing technique was pretty rubbish also so that was something that I had to work on. My problem was that I wasn't adding enough pressure when pulling the ink through, that combined with my weaker left side and you could tell how that was going to end.

More the reason for me to keep working at it though.

These ones however came out spot on, after improving my technique and adding in all of the suggested tweaks I managed to pick up the pace by laying 3 of the 4 colours down in one sitting, before it had taken me around 2 days to get it all sorted.


I really love these prints, they turned out pretty good and they are much better than my original attempts. The natural speckling that occurs when pulling the ink through added something really nice to the image.

This project was a big challenge for me but it spilled out such a satisfying reward, I am fairly confident with the screen printing process now and I would definitely like to try my hand at it again and do some more CMYK prints as my artwork translates nicely to this medium.

AD33, Nursery rhyme inspiration

For the nursery rhyme project I wanted the images to be very detailed and textured, naturally through experimentation with other images I started to refine a way of working which seemed to look quite Victorian and I liked it. Whilst I was drawing my characters out for the first nursery design (Hey Diddle Diddle) I was looking at Lane Smith's work quite frequently.

The Stinky Cheeseman is a fantastic book illustrated by Smith and I feel that it really helped to inspire that way that I made these images.

This style is really rustic and I love it, Lane makes a lot of cool effects by mixing washing up liquid in with her painting media and it gives this really nice speckled effect. This was something that I wanted to work on throughout this module, I wanted to spend an afternoon or two just throwing things onto a canvas and making a mess.

Keeping within the same theme I found this awesome version of 'There was an old lady who swallowed a fly' illustrated by Jeremy Holmes, who might I add is really good at what he does!
This made me want to try my hand at photo montage, it seemed to suit the kind of style I was going for and it added that extra creepy edge to it.



Speaking of creepy I also remembered the end credits for the film 'A Series of Unfortunate Events' and how much I loved them. Everything looks like one big stage production and even the characters themselves are portrayed as set props moving to the command of the composer.
I have added in the video link below, please take a moment to watch it, they truly are some of the best end credits I have ever seen!

AD33 - Nursery rhyme illustration - The making of there was an old lady.

For the three nursery themed illustrations I made sure to take a lot of print screens so that I could document the process in full detail. 

It is also weird to see my images stripped back in this way and it was good to see the full transformation as it looks totally different before it makes it's journey into Photoshop. 

Here we go! 

The print screens start at the digital process, for sketches refer back to sketch pages. 

Okay so I start off by throwing the line work into Sketchbook Pro, I then start masking out the rough shapes. For this one I thought it best to establish the outside boarders of the old lady character first so I could fully see the shape that I am working with. 

This is the colour reference doodle I have opened in another window so that I can colour match as I am blocking out the shapes. I find it is in good practise to rough out colours in this way because then I am not going into a busy illustration completely blind. I also manage to recycle this image later on in the process. 

So yeah there are a lot of screen grabs and some sections are self explanatory but I will highlight crucial moments in the process, my brain does tend to jump all over the place when it comes to these busy illustrations. 

Here I am just starting to fill in the characters. 

Again here I am just messing with the colours to make sure everything is working, wasn't too sure about the red inner stomach at this point. 

At this point most of the shapes are finished and I am starting to add in the details such as the legs on my spider character, once the bird went in I felt a lot better about the image as a whole, I was worried that it wasn't going to work but I powered through! 

Now all of the characters are in and I added in decorative details and additional colours. This is the point where the stitch and dot lines start to take shape on my illustrations. 

Brushing in more shadows and adding stitch lines. 

Reviewing previous shapes and lightening parts to make them pop more. 

Okay so the after all of the artwork is shaded and the basic details are added in I then move over to Photoshop for the addition of texture and layer masks, this is my favourite part! 

First I throw and overlay across the entire illustration, I do this to understand the quality and variety of my original colour swatch, it is here that I start tinting my image with darker shades to bring the overall brightness down. 

Once happy with a basic palette I move onto adding textures, to start I throw one across the entire image to see how texture interacts with every element on the page. This part is important because in the past I have made the mistake of just dropping a texture on top of the entire image and it just throws everything off balance, texture should brush up against the artwork and overtake some sections but never dominate the piece. 

Here I am making layer masks and dropping certain textures around specific parts of the characters. The middle screen grab shows the selective texture, the orange areas are the areas that I wanted to target with the effect. 

I really loved this texture I made for the bird, It was made by throwing ink down on some paper and then covering it with cling film, after it dried the film peeled straight off leaving a cracked shiny layer which had a lovely range of opacities. 

At this point I am just finalizing the image and playing around with the opacities of each effect, one of the last things I do is throw another colour layer over the whole image and then add a tint to the entire piece which gives it this ages Victorian look which I think works really well! 

The last thing to go in is the font and the distressed edges, and that's a wrap for that one. 

From start to finish they take me around 2-3 evenings to finish. I think that is a fairly good pace to work at, this skill could prove to be a life saver if a client ever wanted something done with very short notice. 

This is also a skill that I would hope to improve, I want to be faster but I wouldn't want it to hinder the artwork in the process so I must be careful. 

AD33 - Some of my favourite illustrators started following me on Instagram!

Okay so I made a post a little while ago about celebrating my 200th follower on Instagram, well since then I have had a few other very interesting and cool things happen.
First off I was experimenting with new brushes, I drew an odd fish dinosaur character just to test the line quality. Any how It reminded me of the way that Andrew Kolb  works, he has always been a big influence to me so it wasn't a shock that I retained some of his brush tips and tricks.
After uploading the evening doodle to Instagram I thought I would tag him in it to show my followers where my influence came from.

Then this happened...

I mean WOW right? Not only did he comment but he liked the image and started following me!

That meant the world to me that he actually replied, I never thought that would have been the case. It gave me a slight boost in confidence and also after making this character I wanted to make a few more with a similar line quality.



So the next great thing that happened occurred about two days ago and I wasn't really ready for this one.
I have always been inspired by Steve Simpson and his mind boggling images, he has a really good selection of custom bar codes that he had made on his website, inspired by this I wanted to make my own for my activity book. So I gave it a go!

Through courtesy and curiosity I thought I would tag him in this post as he inspired me to do it, also I was feeling hopeful after the Kolb experience!

At this point I nearly fell from my chair as you can surely imagine...



But yeah how cool is that!
Also making bar codes is incredibly addicting and I want to make a little set of them, custom codes are definitely the future and I will be making one whenever I get the chance.

I feel that it is good news that some of my favourite professional artists like me work, gives me more reason to push forward!

I will buy these men a pint one day!

AD33 - making robot pages - The process

Now because there was a lot of drawing and designing involved for the activity book I found it fairly hard to document every step of every page. Instead I have taken some screen grabs of various images and set out the order in which they came together. It is good to see my artwork at it's various stages of completion as it allows me to reflect back on what could be changed to optimize my workload.

My sketches start out on paper, I then scan that in and use that as my rough guide. Then instead of colouring one thing at a time I set out all of the shapes and their chosen colour, this acts as my colour skeleton.

It starts to get a little confusing when they layers start building up but at this point I am just deciding which shapes go behind other shapes, building up this way allows me to see the final form without committing to final colouring.

Finally I add in small details and any hand lettering that needs to go in. These screens were taken whilst I was in-between two different images so I apologise for the sudden change in image, the method is the same either way. Once I have set everything out I'll go ahead and block in the shapes to begin the final version of the image.

Finally the text goes in and that for the most part is that image completed. I would maybe add in a drop shadow to the text just to bring it out a little.

Also I apologise for the web quality, I assure you the lines are as crisp and tidy as Salvador Dali's facial hair. (perhaps not the best analogy but I am going with it)

AD33 - This film is fantastic!

Slightly off topic yet completely relevant post, I recently watched The Book of Life and it was bloody fantastic!
My friends suggested that I watch it because the style in which the characters are made is similar to the way I make images, so I gave it a watch.

This film was visually beautiful and perfectly animated, it is not often that I am inspired by a film but it does just go to show that I should look a lot further than just other artists for inspiration. It seems that inspiration comes in all shapes and sizes.

I love how the Mexican day of the dead theme is really dominant, also every character is animated to look like a puppet which is a really cool effect.

I posted this mainly because I wanted to start being more free with my blog and instead of just posting pages and pages of research I could occasionally throw in something that I am inspired by or something awesome that I have seen and just needed to document it.