Today I wrapped up the Temple Top picture. I added some shadows to help the characters standout from the background. I also gave Buddy a crouching posture as he peers into the distance looking for his relatives in the highlands of Mexico. Tomorrow I’ll start working on the jungle picture as they begin their trek to the Mountain of Monarch Butterflies.
Today’s Al Fresco Art Club Challenge was to experiment with an unfamiliar medium. I chose colored pencils.
While I was drawing and coloring, I felt like I had traveled back in time to the second grade, when simply going to school was an adventure in getting along with people. I decided to show Buddy Butterfly getting the idea that he should keep flying south to Mexico, where Monarch butterflies from all over North America congregate every Fall in the jungle mountains. In this picture he’s describing his crazy thought that he should fly down to Mexico to find his real family. Sounds like a good idea to me!
42/365
Today’s painting shows Momma Jay and Jimmy welcoming the Monarchs to Ashland. I’ve never seen a mass migration of Monarch butterflies here, but once Fall arrives, we get quite a few of these handsome beings as they pass through Southern Oregon on their way to the warm South. You may notice that one butterfly in the picture has a very human head. That’s got to be Buddy Butterfly, soon to be Jimmy’s best friend.
Since the iMac has been hung up all day failing to install Mojave, I’m working on my Windows laptop and using the free Gimp image editor. Any port in a storm I say.
No grisaille today. The more I experiment with watercolor over a gray under-layer, the drearier it looks. The muted colors are too much of a downer for children’s books, at least in my hands. Continuing to practice with this style isn’t going to move me toward my March 31 deadline.
Love those Monarch Butterflies. Of course, they’re looking for a milkweed snack.
29/365
I thought that yesterday’s version of the poppy field was over-painted, so today I tried to restrain my heavy hand. I used the lightpad to trace yesterday’s painting using a brown Prismacolor pencil onto some Strathmore Bristol board, then had at it. I lighted up on Buddy Butterfly to give him a little lighter feel, and I incorporated some reflected light in Jimmy Jay’s shirt and pants. I then went over some of the lines with a black Prismacolor pencil.
Then I got carried away sprinkling yellow color into the sky, as if to say, “Hey, it’s a brilliantly sunny day and these guys are gonna be best friends.”
UPDATE: rescanned this image with my new A3 scanner. The quite blues in the sky were nonexistent when I scanned with my ancient HP printer/scanner.
28/365
Today the pressure of my self-imposed March 31 deadline hit me hard. With all of the questions of style, color palette, line width, pen and ink, or brush and ink, etc. running through my head, I felt the I was spinning my wheels when I should be working through my storyboard. I decided to skip all of the questions of technique and just draw and paint the best I can.
I chose to draw and paint Jimmy Jay making friends with Buddy Butterfly in a field of poppies. I think they both want to be the boss of the poppy Buddy is sitting on. By the way, Buddy is supposed to be a Monarch butterfly — I’ve definitely got his colors too reddish, but I’ll fix that in the final rendition. And I’ll make the poppies more poppyish. All in all, this is one more inch of progress.
In this picture I inkied only Jimmy and Buddy, and outlined a couple of poppies with a Prismacolor black colored penci. It’s produces a soft black that doesn’t overpower.
6/365
I looked at my reference photo a dozen times drawing this Monarch butterfly and got the white marking all wrong. I’m going to put “pay more attention to details” on my TODO list. Today I inked this with a Zig Cartoonist sable brush. I heard somewhere that the pros use this brush. Naturally, I wanted one, thinking it probably had some magic in it. However, in my hands this brush is like a slippery eel flopping across the page. More practice needed.
The Zig cartoonist sable brush is might difficult to handle. The sable hair is generously long, and very flexible, almost like a rigger. My heavy-hand sent the line skidding around the page. Still, the brush endows lines with lots of personality.
