Redrawing the arrival in Ashland scene

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Today’s inch was to redo the linework for the “arrival” page, but alas, I couldn’t find the original drawing. “Not a big dealt,” I thought. “I’ll just redraw it — it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.”

But my brain seemed to have taken the day off. The first two attempts had some weird perspective going on, medieval perspective, in fact. The kind of perspective where a bird in the distance looks bigger than a house in the foreground. Eventually I pushed myself away from my sketchbook and took a timeout to eat some macadamia nuts. They jump-started my nervous system, and when I returned to drawing, I came up with the image below, which I think is an improvement on the original, which I can’t find anyway.

I’ve decided to bring the two mice along for the ride. They’ll be appearing just about everywhere as spectators, and who knows, they may end up being the stars of their own story when I finish this book.

I’ll be adding tails to the mice. Tails are always a nuisance when animals are wearing clothes.

Two versions of a page in progress for the children's book

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I finished the drawing I started yesterday, the drawing of the two boys reading a comic book. I replaced the ominous cat with two cute mice, moved Buddy Butterfly’s antennae out of the way and added some hatching. Today it was Photoshop to the rescue.

I moved Buddy’s antennae to give the mice more focus. He’s got an extra pair before I took the image to Photoshop

Still more cleaning up to do…

Updated "Jay Family is Going South" drawing

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Another character on the bus with the Jays, Buddy Butterfly. He’s going South, too. The oldest story in the world…making friends with strangers on a long-haul bus trip.

I won’t be doing anymore painting until I have all of the drawings. I’m going to paint them in a single batch to ensure that the colors are consistent throughout the book.

The moustache needed a mouth to adorn..

The Jay Family is Going South

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Moving forward one inch today entails drawing the sketch of the Jay family getting on to the Magic Moustache Bus, whose bus driver is a grizzly bear, a friendly one in this case. This is the second time I’ve drawn this scene. Here’s the first version.

I have a few details to add inside the bus, and perhaps some hatching, and more work on the giant moustache. And I’m going to put some passengers in the windows.

In this picture I gave the girls human eyes rather than the round eyes I’ve been using so far. The round eyes are more difficult to draw with expression and feeling. As for color, I’m undecided how to paint this. I’ll sleep on it.

All aboard for the ride of your life!

A bird and a butterfly draw each other's portrait

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A quickie today. While I was at work I got the idea of having Jimmy and Buddy doing fun stuff like drawing silly portraits of each other, as best friends do. I would use this image in the sequence where the two best friends ride bikes, play football, play cards. Real bromance stuff.

I limited colors today: cool blue, yellow ochre, and purple.

Constructing My Children's Picture Book: Page One

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I’m looking for a way to have consistent colors from page 1 to 32. Watercolor looks great, but mixing identical colors for 32 pages will be a challenge. Copic markers will work and look great. Ecoline watercolors can be consistent if I can settle on a color palette. Digital coloring using Photoshop or the iPad is also a good option. Now the I see the problem: I have too many options, and I have beginner skills with all of them.

Today’s picture is inked with a Uni-ball Vista pen and colored with Ecoline liquid watercolors. As soon as I finished this I wanted to change the text; next time the text goes on a separate piece of paper for layering in Photoshop. Maybe I’ll do the same with backgrounds, too.

Laundry day, Apartamento Magazine, and Letterkenny

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I like doing laundry. It’s the only place I can sit and relax while the washing machine is chugging away. I sit next to it so I can lift the lid when it gets hung up before the spin cycle. When it starts to grind I reach over from my comfy camp chair and lift the lid, then go back to reading my new issue of Apartamento with an eye-catching clair ligne drawing by Nazario Luque on the cover — he’s the king of Spanish underground comics. After that I watched an episode of Letterkenny, my new favorite show, second only to Rick and Morty.

After all that relaxation, I got a craving for a cup of coffee, which got me back in the mood to dig in to my children’s book project. I spent several hours researching exactly how many pages the typical children’s book has (32), and how many actual pages there will be for images. That’s more complicated, but I narrowed that answer down to 14 two-page spreads after subtracting the front and back covers, the front and back white-matter, the copyright page, and the title. 14 two-page spreads translates to 24 images for single pages and 2 images for two two-page spreads.

The sketch below shows Momma Jay walking her Pomeranian. This picture has nothing to do with the children’s book. I used my Rotring Isograph .20 for the fine lines. My Rotrings are a smooth ride compared to my rather scratch Rapidograph technical pens.

Cover page, take #1

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Today I drew my first cover page based on the storyboard I completed yesterday. I got the idea that the cover should show Jimmy Jay standing jauntily next to the chimney he’s going to jump down in the course of the story. I want him to look confident and safe. I want the readers to feel that even though he’s going to do something daring and dangerous, he’s going to be okay in the end.

I first sketched in pencil and was about to ink it when I got the crazy idea that it would be faster to do digitally on my iPad. Wrong! After a few minutes of struggling to find a decent Procreate brush to mimic my ink pens, I realized that I’d been overcome by digital was somehow better and faster than old-fashioned pen and ink. I put on the brakes and ditched the iPad. I pulled out a sheet of tracing paper, inked with a Uni-ball liner, and then scanned it. Ooops! I scanned the wrong side of the paper and got a fuzzy, but appealing, scan with interesting texture and a nice blurry glow.

I’ll do take cover page take #2 tomorrow.

Got to work on the crossed legs…the line of action and the center of gravity don’t work together..

Wrapping up the storyboard for my children’s book

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Today I wrapped up the storyboard. I’m happy to say that despite my Inner Critic telling me that my new story really sucked and that I should come up with a new plot, I turned down the volume on that voice and turned up the volume on the Milt Jackson album and went about my business.

The page below will give an idea of what my concept of how I do storyboard. At least this is my concept of my first story board. It may look a little chaotic and verbose, but it’s all going to be okay. I now have a starting point for creating the final drawings.

After experimenting with gouache, limited palettes, heavy outlines, grisaille, I’ve decided to return to my natural style, which is simple pen and ink…with a little watercolor wash now and then.

In my world a bird can talk to people, and the other way around, or course.

Getting back to the storyboard

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Today I decided to get back to basics and do a second draft of the storyboard. When I started this project, the first thing I did was a quick storyboard with some sketchy thumbnails. Now 45 days later I’m redoing the entire storyboard to match the bigger story I want to tell. I completed 2/3 of the revision tonight, and I’ve left myself a righteous possibility of completing the storyboard tomorrow.

I sketched everything in ink today in the interest of saving time. It’s just faster for me to use ink instead of pencil. When I sketch with pencil I have a tendency to try to fix bad drawing. With ink I have no regrets…it’s full speed ahead.

The story has grown larger and picked up a new character and more pages. I’ll have to do some editing to get it down to 24 pages. Here’s a snippet showing my final drawing for today…a pair of eyeballs in a dark place.