Artist at Work
Here is the new 24"x36" oil painting for the wrap-around cover of my 2012 edition of the story, which took around five weeks to finish.
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The Golden Wood
- a painting in progress from The Twelve Dancing Princesses
Here is my "thumbnail" sketch from the storyboard -about 2x4 inches
It took me three days to photograph the models for this book. For this painting alone I probably took over 50 pictures, taking them in small groups of two and three. Also, a number of the models posed for two princesses each, changing clothes to become a different princess. It was complicated to keep track of it all!
Here is the final sketch in the book dummy, 11x17 inches. The notes are notes on the colors for the various dresses. The scene in the story of the golden wood was the one I wanted to "key" the rest of the book to, so the color scheme is quite golden, with a bit of green and a touch of blue, but no bright colors to compete with the magical "golden" feel of the scene.
I have been fascinated with the different ways to offer books digitally, including the world of interactive apps. After pondering how to make picture books with long texts into apps for small screens, I decided to challenge myself and try to reformat one of my books to work well in this medium. I chose Cinderella, an OP book originally published by Little, Brown, for which I have had the rights reverted to me. I could see many opportunities in this story for the interactive elements required for an app.
PicPocket Books was interested in producing it, and I hired my programmer/animator daughter to create animated sparkles on the pages where there is "fairy dust." PicPocket planned to add lots of nice sound effects that you discover by tapping the pictures. The challenge still lay in the length of text. A picture book double spread averages 11x17 inches. Shrinking the whole thing down would create text too small to read. In my other apps the narrator reads the story while the text is shown alone, then alternating with a picture, and I felt that these were more like audiobooks with occasional pictures than interactive apps. I wanted to have a picture shown on every page, but how to fit all those darn words??
My solution was to crop each picture from the book in a number of ways so that the longer text would be spread out over multiple pages. I decided that a vertical format would allow more room for text. Above is a double-spread from the original picture book, and below are the three scenes I created from it for the app.
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| This is the right hand side of the page reversed. I tried to leave close to half of each picture for the text to overprint. |
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| In this case I cropped in and screened back the bottom of her dress for the text to overprint. |
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And here the text will be white against the dark grass.
I spent around 5 days reformatting the pictures, and I feel it was worth the experiment. My hope is that even though it does not have as many bells and whistles as heavily interactive apps, it will hopefully still do well. The nice thing about digital media is that an app or an ebook will probably be available for many more years than the book in print. Cinderella is currently out of print as a picture book, so this app has brought it back to life - and it sparkles! |
FALL FAERIE - FROM SKETCH TO FINISH
Here are my first two "idea" sketches for a painting depicting a "spirit of Fall" as a fairy.
A daughter of a friend of mine posed for the fairy and I took photos for reference.
Next I did a detailed drawing on my gessoed board - the picture is 24x36 inches. I do like to precisely plan my paintings when there is so much detail I want to convey.
This was the first day's work.
Here is is after day2 with a bit more detail. I wanted to paint the background around the fairy and work out the complex value patterns.
Working out the flow of her dress was next.
A few more days work...
And it took around three weeks to get to this stage - not quite done.
Finally after a good month or a little longer, the painting is finished! To work in this style requires a great deal of patience, as you might imagine.
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Here is the cover of the first story in the Horse Diaries series, released in April of 2009. This is an exciting new series being published by Random House, with each book told from a different horse's point of view. Each is a different breed, set in an interesting historic setting.
The first book in the series is a story of an Icelandic horse set during the Viking age in Iceland in the year 1000. I had to do a geat deal of research on Viking clothing, houses, and the landscape of Iceland.
The horses that posed for the book are from Robert's Woods Farm in Morterey, Massachusetts.
Here is the first sketch of the scene that I took the above photos for.
Here is the final drawing, and as you can see it is quite a bit more detailed. I did 18 illustrations in all for this book, all in pencil.
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These are the reference photos for one of the scenes in the story, depicted below. I always use real people and I had costumes made for the boys and the girl in the story. I had to take the pictures in winter because of the publisher's schedule, but most of the scenes in the book are in the spring and fall, so there is not much snow in the illustrations.This was the most complicated scene in the book, and because it was winter and my models lived in different places, I had to take the pictures at differnt times and then draw them all into the same scene.
Here is one of the photos I used for reference of a re-created Viking house in Iceland (photo by Bill Short)
This is the sketch for the scene based on all the photos above - usually I don't do quite this detailed a sketch, but the art director requested "finished" looking sketches as they wanted to show a mock-up of the book to the sales force to show them what it would look like.
This is what the final illustration looks like. Whew! This one was the most difficult picture to draw in the book.
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Cinderella
in progress
For all my picture books, I start with a storyboard, which is the entire story on one page - 14"x20" or so. I often do more than one version, and sometimes cut and paste new sketches over ones I change my mind about. This is the most important stage of the story and where one decides the key scenes, the flow of the book, the page-turns, etc. After this process, which can take a few weeks to a month or more, depending on the book, I start gathering reference materials and find models for the characters in the book. The storyboard above is from Cinderella, and the pictures on the right are a few of my reference pictures for the cover image. I also found pictures in my files of ivy-covered walls, roses, and flying birds.
Here is a closeup of the cover sketch, showing that I don't just copy my photo reference, but use it as a base for my own imagination.
And here is the final cover, which "wraps" around to the back of the book.
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The Enchanted Wood
in Progress
These trees were some of my inspiration for "the Heart of the World," the great tree in the Enchanted Wood.
The picture above left is an enlargement of my storyboard sketch. On the right is the final full-sized sketch in the book dummy.
Here is the final illustration.
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The Crystal Mountain
in Progress
Here is my photo reference and the finished sketch for this scene from The Crystal Mountain.
And here is the finished painting. This one took 2-3 weeks.
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