Illustration: Stella by Starlight

This week, Colour Collective was 'Phthalo Blue' - a lovely rich deep colour. I chose to use the 1940s song Stella by Starlight, music by Victor Young, lyrics by Ned Washington as my inspiration this week:

Have you seen Stella by starlight

Standing alone, moon in her hair?

Have you seen Stella by starlight

When have you known rapture so rare?

The song a robin sings

Through years of endless springs.

The murmur of a brook at even' tide

That ripples by a nook where two lovers hide.

A great symphonic theme

That's Stella by starlight

And not a dream.

My heart and I agree, 

She's everything on earth to me.

Want to hear it? Johnny Mathis even sings the verse.

Really, I just wanted an excuse to base an illustration around this dress, because it's gorgeous:

I don't know who designed this, I found it on Pinterest, here.

I wish I'd been able to do the sparkles properly, instead of resorting the scatter brush setting, but my drawing arm is not at all happy right now, and complained when I tried to draw each sparkle individually. So scatter brush it was.

Here are the six I have done in this series so far. I think my favourite is still 'A Sleepy Lagoon':

Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2.

Illustration: Moonlight Becomes You

This week's Colour Collective prompt was 'tea rose', a lovely dusty pink. Continuing with my fadeaway girl theme, I chose the song 'Moonlight Becomes You', written by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke for Road to Morocco in 1942, as my inspiration. This is the second week in a row that I've used a song from that team, they must have liked the moon! 

Moonlight becomes you

It goes with your hair

You certainly know the right thing to wear.

Moonlight becomes you

I'm thrilled at the sight

And I could get so romantic tonight.

You're all dressed up to go dreaming

Now don't tell me I'm wrong.

And what a night to go dreaming

Mind if I tag along?

If I say "I love you"

I want you to know

It's not just because there's moonlight, although

Moonlight becomes you so.

Want to hear it? How can we go past Bing Crosby in a clip from Road to Morocco? 

Originally I was planning on having a blonde girl in this image, but once I'd started roughing in some colours I decided that red hair was a more unexpected choice, and really went rather well with the overall image. I think I was channeling Rita Hayworth a bit, and having gone down the bombshell route, I really couldn't resist adding lots and lots of sparkles and chiffon. 

I've now done five Colour Collectives in this series. They're good fun, and an interesting exercise in keeping a whole colour scheme based around one colour, while still getting in enough variation to show shadows and highlights and skintones and everything else. 

Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2.

Illustration: Mariella

My current batch of work requires a lot of waiting, so I've been using the intervals to create personal pieces, so here is a new illustration!

At the moment I am writing the story to go with this. We shall see how far I get!

I'd been toying with the idea of creating a kidlit illustration with a ghost in, and doodled a little character study of a 17th Century character that I named Mariella:

I chose the 17th Century so that there would be a big difference in costume between her and any modern children I drew with her. I wanted it to be obvious that she had been a ghost for a very long time. I browsed Pinterest for 17th Century children's clothing and settled on a date in the 1660s, when costume was rather swashbuckling. 

I did a few thumbnails to play around with compositions, picked the one I liked best, and worked that up. Here's a progress animation of the whole process:

Having settled on my thumbnail (almost illegible, I'm sorry) I sketched up a slightly more detailed plan in my sketchbook, and then took the whole thing into Photoshop to do a draft. Having done that I slapped a bit of colour on to see how everything worked. At this point I made some changes, most noticeably raising the boy's arm so that he could hold a torch. I had been planning on having everything lit with a ghostly blue light, but a flaming torch is more dramatic! 

I then did some tight linework and started painting. The torch was one of the first things I did, so that I could keep the lightsource in mind as I went. In general I like to work with linework, but as I didn't want black outlines everywhere, I painted the linework as well. In places where a bit more definition was needed, I allowed some contrast between the painting and the linework, and where the linework was no longer so necessary, I let it blend in almost entirely. 

It was fun figuring out how best to paint Mariella. As I was painting digitally I could try various things as I went, so you can see her change slightly as I progress. She was always going to be transparent, but I used a layer mask so that I could adjust the transparency to suit - Mariella herself is completely painted (in shades of blue), in case I decided that I wanted her feet visible after all.

I used a couple of textures from cgtextures.com - for the stonework and the door - to speed things up a bit, but other than that, everything is painted by hand on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2 in Adobe Photoshop CC 2015. 

Portrait: Gemma

This portrait of Baby Gemma has recently gone off to the commissioner, so it's time to post it here!

Gemma was a tricky baby to draw, as she is quite fleshy and rounded, which required a lot of care in the rendering to get both realism and a good likeness - I didn't want her to end up looking plasticy! 

My reference was a bit washed-out, but thanks to the wonders of Photoshop I was able to claw back enough detail to allow me to draw the embroidery on her beautiful blanket (with the photograph at its normal state I could barely see the flowers).

Here is a detail:

This portrait took me 15 hours, and I used a 0.5 Mechanical pencil with a #B lead, and blended with tissues, cotton makeup remover pads, cotton buds and blending stumps. I also used plastic, kneadable and electric erasers. For more information on my portraiture tools, head over to this tutorial. It's an A4 portrait on A3 paper. If you're after a graphite portrait, please contact me via my website for more information, I'm always open to commissions for both portraiture and illustration. 

Illustration: Polkadots and Moonbeams

Shield your eyes, this week's Colour Collective was 'chartreuse'!

I wanted to continue my fadeaway girl and moonlight theme, but it was tough to shoehorn chartreuse in! In the end I went with Polkadots and Moonbeams by Jimmy Van Heusen and Johnny Burke as my theme.

A country dance was being held in a garden

I felt a bump and heard an 'Oh, beg your pardon'

Suddenly I saw

Polkadots and moonbeams

All around a pug-nosed dream

The music started and was I the perplexed one

I held my breath and said 'May I have the next one?'

In my frightened arms

Polkadots and moonbeams

Sparkled on a pug-nosed dream

There were questions

In the eyes of other dancers

As we floated over the floor

There were questions

But my heart knew all the answers

And perhaps a few things more

Now in a cottage built of lilacs and laughter

I know the meaning of the words 'Ever After'

And I'll always see

Polkadots and moonbeams

When I kiss the pug-nosed dream

Want to hear it? Here's Frank Sinatra's version.

The song is a pretty romantic standard, but I decided that a fast-paced swing dance could easily result in an accidental bump on the dancefloor (and then a segue into a slow dance), so I added silhouettes of a few other girls dancing to set the mood. And the chartreuse background was just crying out for a beautiful African girl to look stunning in the bright colour. 

The fadeaway effect is less prominent here simply because of the polkadots, but it does have a precedent in Coles Phillips very first fadeaway girl magazine cover in 1908:

He spent a lot more time on his polkadots, clearly, but I wasn't going for a fully realistic placement, which would clash a bit with the flatness of the pics I've already done. 

Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2

Illustration: Blue Moon

Continuing my theme of Coles Phillips inspired fadeaway girls inspired by standard song titles for Colour Collective. This week the colour was Payne's Grey - rather more blue than grey really, and therefore a perfect opportunity to do an illustration based on the song Blue Moon by Rogers and Hart. 

Blue Moon

You saw me standing alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own

Blue moon

You knew just what I was there fore

You heard me saying a prayer for

Someone I really could care for

And then there suddenly appeared before me

The only one my arms will ever hold

I heard somebody whisper 'please adore me'

And when I looked the moon had turned to gold

Blue moon

Now I'm no longer alone

Without a dream in my heart

Without a love of my own

Want to hear it? Here is Julie London's version.

This was an interesting exercise in cool skintones - I wanted it to look like night time but not wash out all of the skintones, which would make the whole illustration look very cold, so I went with mauve tones with paynes grey added into the shadows.

Blue Moon was originally written in the early 30s, with three different sets of lyrics before it actually became Blue Moon with the fourth set - but most of the classic recordings of it are late 40s and 1950s, so I went with a fun 50s party dress and ponytail combo.

I was mucking about in Photoshop and decided to make a small animation for the line 'and when I looked the moon had turned to gold', just to see if I could make it work (animation effects are not my forte)

Adobe Photoshop CC 2015 on a Wacom Cintiq Companion 2

About 4 to 5 hours. 

Here are the three in this set that I have done so far. I think they look quite nice all together. 

I need to tweak the first one slightly - it was done much more quickly, and I'd like to adjust it so that it matches the other two a bit better in terms of moon size and the like. 

Moonlight Serenade [CC Champagne]

A Sleepy Lagoon [CC Magenta Haze]

The Process of a Picture Book Spread

My last blog post was about the picturebook The Suitcase Cyclist, which I illustrated. This post is to show the process we went through to get from initial thumbnail to finished spread - it's my usual process for a project of this type.

This was the first page I did, as Barbara, the author, was not used to commissioning illustrations, and I wanted to work up a sample of what the spreads would look like, so she could see how my idea of having black and white linework backgrounds would work. 

1: Thumbnail

My initial thumbnail was very rough, and was done at the very beginning of the process, when I had the text, but no idea how many children were involved - so there are only two children visible. The basic idea was to have the children and grandad dancing with Elvis on the set of Jailhouse Rock. I did the thumbnails for the whole book before meeting with Barbara, and talked through my ideas with her when I met up with her.

2: Rough layout

After a meeting with Barbara, I leaned that there were five grandchildren to be included. Barbara didn't want me to draw them specifically, but gave me their genders, hair colour and ages, so I went away and did a very rough sketch in Photoshop (in red) to see how I could fit everyone in. 

3: Rough Draft

I then worked that  rough sketch up into a slightly-less-rough draft (in blue). Ordinarily, it would be at this point that I would send it to Barbara for her approval to move to the next stage, but as she had never commissioned an illustration before, just for this sample I moved ahead on my own - because it was just a sample, and I wanted to show her that my ugly draft would turn into something better. The draft stage can scare a lot of private clients, as they are always so rough and ugly, as it is at this point that most changes happen, so I don't invest too much time into making them pretty. 

4: Sample pencilling & digital colour

Next I pencilled, using the draft as a guide, so that there would be something tight and semi-finished to show Barbara. 

I scanned in my pencils, darkened them to simulate inking, and added some digital colour, so that Barbara could see the general effect of a finished piece, without my having to work this all the way up to the final without any approval. 

I then sent screenshots of each step in the process to Barbara, so that she could see exactly how a picture progressed, and made it clear when were the best points to ask for changes, and which stages I would send to her for her approval (at the thumbail and draft stages, with option to make smaller changes at the pencil stage. After that, working traditionally, changes would mean starting over.)

4a: Pencils

Barbara liked the sample, but there were some changes to be made: She had decided that she would like the children to look more like her real grandchildren, and had decided to add in the youngest, a toddler, as well. She provided me with some photos, and I did a new set of pencils with the kids changed. 

5: Inks

I sent the pencils to Barbara for her approval, and as she was happy, I used a lightbox to trace the pencils onto Moleskine watercolour paper with Artline Drawing System Pens. I put the file into a special dropbox folder for Barbara to see the process. 

5: Watercolour

I then added colour with Winsor & Newton watercolours.

6: Typesetting

Finally I scanned in the finished result and added text in Adobe InDesign CC.

Here's the finished spread in the book:

After this initial spread, when Barbara was clear about how everything worked, I set up dropbox folders for drafts, pencils, inks & watercolours, so that she could check over things at her leisure. I also sent through a number of dummies at various points, so that we could check that everything flowed properly.