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Thursday, July 28, 2022
Making Treats and Beasts - The Cover
The other piece of art and design I had to think about when I decided to make this a book was the cover. While working on the animal drawings I had zero thought about if this was going to be a book, and less about details like covers. When I started working on colouring the drawings I realized that this book is probably going to need a cover. I'll admit that my first thought was just to collage a few of the drawings together and see if that worked out.
Then I was doodling in a my sketchbook and I decided to start with a circle. I thought that maybe I could make a circle (which is a common shape themed in this book) and randomly scatter a few drawings around it. I thought maybe the drawings could be held up using trees. Then I started thinking about decorating those trees with candy. Finally I thought that maybe instead of just reusing a few of the animal drawings, I could put some nice text in the trees.
Next thing I knew I had a rough concept for the cover. I used some pencil crayons to see how it might work in colour. I made a few mistakes on my rough attempt, but I feel like the overall concept worked. Now that I knew I was going this direction, I knew I had to ink it up and get it under the camera to shoot.
It took a few attempts to ink it up. I'm actually not very confident with my inking, particularly when it comes to letters. I feel like this worked pretty well, and the next phase was to colour it up. Fortunately that wasn't too hard as I already had a rough drawing in colour to reference. I probably should have done that with all the animal drawings, but live and learn.
Next, some of the challenges I had with this book.
CC
Thursday, July 21, 2022
Making Treats and Beasts - The Inks Turn Into A Book
As I mentioned before, I really had no direct plan to turn this collection of drawings into a book. In fact I wasn't even sure that I would finish all of the drawings. I figured I might loose interest at some point and just move onto something else. The thing is, I didn't. I really wanted to try and finish each and every drawing in the collection, and near the last few drawings I realized that I think it would make a really fun collection, maybe in a book format.
After deciding this, my next phase was to figure out how the book should look. I decided that I would use a few electronic fonts, however I wanted the letter that was showcased to be my own design. Since I had designed the animals and snacks using a rough circle template, I figured the letters should also fit into this template. I found lots of reference online and starting sketching out some font ideas. Eventually I had each letter drawn and inked.
The other choice I made once I decided to make a book was that I wanted the illustrations to be in colour. I don't own a scanner and I didn't want to buy one for this project. I still wasn't convinced it would actually pan out. Since I am a photographer, I decided that I would photograph each drawing. This turned out to be fairly challenging, particularly getting the light just right. I built a setup and had to shoot each and every drawing on the same day. I wanted to make sure they all matched perfectly.
After that I brough everything into various Adobe editing tools and after a few drawings were done I had a system that worked fairly well. The good thing about taking the photos of the art was the fact that many of the sketchy lines and even the texture of the paper came through just a little bit. I feel it gave the art a really nice natural feeling.
The colouring was probably the hardest part of the process for me. I'm not a great expert on colours, and I found parts of this process to be very hard on the eyes. I do however feel that it worked out fairly well and I'm glad I went beyond black and white.
Next the cover idea.
Make sure to get your very own copy of Treats and Beast right now on Amazon.
CC
Friday, July 15, 2022
One More Bathroom On The Road To 1200
Check out the who map below:
Thursday, July 14, 2022
Making Treats and Beasts - Rough, Design and Finished Inks
After finally coming up with a concept for an alphabet book, treats and beasts, I had to draw each and every creature and snack. I started each drawing with a very rough pencil sketch. I referenced the animals a great deal from photos online. I never traced anything, but I would have pages on a Google search open throughout most of the sketching process. I would fixate on a few particular images, but I tried to take bits and pieces from each.
Rather than have to erase all my rough pencil lines, I used animation paper and I would then trace out a cleaner version of my sketch onto another piece of paper. The animation paper would allow me to trace the other image easily since I had animation pegs to keep both drawings lined up. Next I would use a few inking tools, mostly sharpy pens and fine liners, and I would start inking my drawings.
I probably worked on the first two or three drawings at the same time when it came to inking. As I progressed I would add a new detail to one drawing and then go back to the others and add the same kind of detail. I love this stage of making art because it allows me to watch television and movies while working. Eventually I discovered the amount of detail I wanted to add without overworking the drawing.
This was probably the longest process of making this book. It was also the most Zen of them of them all. I could just sit and doodle away while watching television. I should also mention that at this point I had not actually decided that this was going to be an actual printed book. My thoughts were that I would just post these pictures online and share them with my friends.
The next phase is when that changed.
Pick up your own copy of the book Treats and Beasts right now on Amazon.
CC
Thursday, July 7, 2022
Making Treats and Beasts - Early Sketches and Concept
I've always wanted to draw an alphabet book. I've thought about it for a while, but I've never been able to figure out a theme that would work for me. Monsters where always an early thought, but while I really enjoy the look of monsters, I don't really know much about monster history, or at least not enough to find a monster for each letter of the alphabet. That's the first big problem you get when you're coming up with an alphabet book, figuring out a character or idea for the most obscure letters of the alphabet.
Then one day I was sketching in my sketchbook and a thought crossed my mind, I drew a walrus eating wine gums. The idea suddenly crossed my mind, I love animals and I obviously love candy. While I do care for the wellbeing of animals, my main interest is learning about different kinds of animals, this is why the alphabet concept worked well for me in this case. Candy is also an obsession of mine, and once again it's about the variety of candy that I love.
So after sketching out the walrus eating wine gums, I started to sketch and write out animals and candy for each letter of the alphabet. Fairly quickly I had all the animals and treats sorted out. There were a few challenging letters to deal with, but not as many as I was expecting. The bigger problem I had was trying to find treats for each letter. I didn't want to use brand names in this book, so the challenge was to find non brand names for certain letters of the alphabet. Fortunately I've traveled a fair bit and had treats from many places around the world, so in some cases I used more obscure foreign treats to fill in some of the harder letters of the alphabet.
The next step was to design the book and start the rough drawings.
You can pick up your own copy of Treats and Beast right now on Amazon.
Monday, July 4, 2022
Three New Bathrooms To Add
For Canada Day we managed to add three new bathrooms to our Bathrooms We've Been To Map.
We had an epic adventure...
But had to make a few pit stops along the way.
Check out the full map right now:
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