Study for potential first pages of my children’s book

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22/365

I’m starting to feel the my days dwindling down to March 31. As of today, I should be drawing a complete page every 3 days. Yesterday I faced the obvious fact that I haven’t got a single page drawn in the 21 days I’ve been on this project. So, today I thought I’d better get started even if I don’t feel ready. I thought the books should start with a two-page image that introduces the Jaybird family, Momma, Jenny, and Jimmy Jay.

Rather than having them flying south, I thought I’d have them take the bus instead. This seemed like a good idea since I haven’t really worked out whether my birds will have arms with hands and fingers, or have wings. And if they have wings, how would they carry their luggage, which looks quite heavy.

I’ll be working on my lettering and wavering daily on the color palette for this story.

Another Jaybird that turned out older than he should have. I’ll just say that he’s one of Jimmy’s uncles.

Thinking about a cover page for my children’s book

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21/365

My goal is to move at least an inch closer to my goal everyday. The goal, I remind myself, is to publish The Jaybird Who Fell Down a Chimney by March 31. Children’s picture books usually have 28 to 32 pages, and at this point I have zero pages.

One of today’s pictures is a doodle of a momma jaybird. I’m not sure if she’s Jimmy Jay’s mother, or one of his hottie aunts who lives two houses down on Jaybird Street. The second picture shows Jimmy goofing off in the chimney and giving a self-assured thumbs to show how cool he is. Jimmy looks about 20 in this picture, so I’m going to have to think hard about shaving 15 years off his appearance.

What a hottie!

Jimmy looks like a cocky high school sophomore. There is one obvious improvement over yesterday’s 35-year-old Jimmy — no 5 o’clock shadow.

Cartoon bird expressions

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20/365

I’ve been thinking that my characters need expressions that show them laughing, smiling, surprised, and being sad. I have two references for facial expressions: Jack Hamm’s Cartooning the Head & Figure and Gary Faigin’s The Artist’s Complete Guide to Facial Expression. The former is super corny, old-fashioned cartoon-style, which you’d expect from Jack Hamm, who worked on Bugs Bunny back in the day. Guide to Facial Expression is super-advanced with deep analysis of the muscles involved in the expressions we humans can show. At this stage of my artistic development I went with Cartooning the Head & Figure.

The problem I ran into was that Jimmy Jay is 5-years old and all of my expressions came out looking adult. Solution: more practice with attention given to keeping Jimmy Jay from prematurely aging. On the bright side, some of these expressions will work for his mother.

Jimmy’s 5 o’clock shadow makes him look a little down-and-out.

Concept Hair for Jimmy Jay

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19/365

I’m working on stabilizing Jimmy’s hair, and for that matter, the hairstyle for all of the Jay family. Jimmy’s hair is leaning toward pointy, and the women seem to have a little more flair and rounder corners. In some of the images Jimmy is looking too old for the story. He’s supposed to be 7 or 8 and he looks 30.

As for color, there’s going to be some variety. After all, this is not going to be a realistic children’s book. By the way, no Photoshop funny business with the images.

More Jimmy Jay concept drawings in gouache

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18/365

More gouache versions of Jimmy Jay…and there’s a human in there, too. I usually paint with a size 8 brush, but today I pulled out my Winsor and Newton Series 7 size 3. It’s a sweet Kolinsky sable brush that holds lots of paint and it comes to a nice point. It’s pricey but worth the money.

No Photoshop monkey business with these paintings.

What!? There’s a human being in this picture!

What!? There’s a human being in this picture!

I notice that gouache has an appealing gritty look when it’s thinned down.

I notice that gouache has an appealing gritty look when it’s thinned down.

Concept drawings, over and over

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17/365

I’m still struggling to create the look for Jimmy Jay. I’m frustrated that every time I draw him, he looks different. I’m hoping that if I draw him a 100 or 200 times that I’ll eventually work out how to draw him. Here are some of today’s renditions of Jimmy Jay, hero of The Jay Who Fell Down the Chimney.

The potbelly stove in ink and watercolor

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16/365

Again, the the gouache painting is too leaden. I’m going to move on from the Zorn palette to something a little brighter. I haven’t decided what colors I’ll be using.

Today I punched away wildly at my Daniel Smith Ultimate Mixing palette and the colors were okay until I painted the little flower pot on top of the stove. That Cerrulean Blue Chromium it a little too wild, but I approve of the rest of the picture. Pen and ink really floats my boat.

The squiggly lines show that there’s a complaining jaybird inside that stove.

Could use a shadow under the stove…that’s that voice of my inner critic talking to me. What a pest that guy is. All he ever does is bitch and moan.

The fireplace in watercolor

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14/365

My first version of the fireplace in gouache struck me as dreary and too tiresome for a children’s book, so I did it over in watercolor thinking I’d liven it up. I used my Daniel Smith Ultimate Mixing palette for the first time. Even though this palette will allegedly mix 60 bazillion colors, I managed to mix only two, a dark gray for the inside of the fireplace, and an off-white for the bricks. Plus, I photoshopped the bejezuz out of this image to change the color of the wall using a linear burn mask. In other words, this image doesn’t look anything like the original watercolor. I’m fine with that.

Note to self: Muji gel pens run like crazy with watercolor, but they don’t run with Copic markers.

Even though I’ve looked at this fireplace thousands of times, I couldn’t draw it accurately from memory. I used a photo reference for this version.

The villain enters the story

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13/365

The fireplace and its chimney are the villains of my story. I needed a model for this character, so I talked my fireplace into posing. My fireplace is actually used for storing my overflow books, but for simplicity’s sake I decided to leave them out.

I’ve been painting for the last week using only the Zorn palette and I like the restrictions it places on me. Since I’m just learning about color mixing, working with only three colors and black and white is actually liberating. These few colors have become almost comforting, whereas my bigger palette with 32 colors is scary.

Character concept: little boy alarmed

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12/365

My goal for this painting was to practice using the least number of brush strokes possible to apply the color to my sketch. My gouache and watercolor paintings suffer from my tendency to use too many faint-hearted little strokes but today I really piled on the gouache in a series of single, heavy strokes. I gave myself a pat on the back.

I did all of the line work in Photoshop and also touched up the stray paint and other marks. This character is the little boy who lives in the house with the chimney that animals like to fall down into every year. In this picture, the boy, who doesn’t have a name yet, is pointing to the chimney and yelling to his grandmother that there’s something inside the fireplace. I’d like to get more feeling into this gesture, and more alarm into his face. It looks like I’ll have to photograph myself yelling with a little fear in the eyes, or maybe Muybridge can help out.