A Clip STudio Paint sketch with a pencil-like brush. With the days getting longer a few minutes each day, I’m optimistic that Spring and Summer are right around the corner, and with them, the return of the weekly meeting of the Al Fresco Art Club. Hooray!
Today was another Chore & Al Fresco Art Club day. The chores were the same as always. The Art Club Challenge was a little out of the ordinary: find an appealing magazine illustration or book cover and copy it. I chose beginner’s guide to digital painting in Photoshop: characters, from 3DTOTAL Publishing. Ironically, I used Procreate for this sketch.
Page 5 and 6 will be a two-page spread showing all of the animals on their way to the circus in Acapulo. Isn’t it interesting to see zebras, lions, and elephants in Mexico?
Chore day is traditionally filled with thoughts of food, from shopping for food, to cooking food, and to eating food. Today I went to the co-op as usual, and cooked my furry boys’ food, as usual, and baked some cookies, as usual. What I did not do was cook a big batch of meals for the next week. I just didn’t feel like spending all day in the kitchen. I’ll bake the veggie loaf and Brussels sprouts (with pecans) tomorrow.
When I had a few moments I made a quick sketch of the view from my kitchen window using a plain old pencil.
I’m working on a picture that show the kids climbing a sheer wall of stone. I’m using one-point perspective to give the picture some interest. The vanishing point — horizon line — is at the bottom of the canyon.
Just got off the phone with the department manager at my day job. He told me that the company is “rightsizing” itself by eliminating 40% of the products I’m responsible for. I’m bummed. Over the last few years I’ve taken a 20% cut, then another a 15% cut, and now a 40% cut. It’s death by a thousand slices, or more drastically, death by three big slices. All is not lost — I’m optimistic about the future. I’ll have more time to devote to my career creating books.
I started painting the backdrop for my cover image before I got the bad news. I like the work I did today. Enough said.
As the paint-a-common-object trend continues at our Al Fresco Art Club Sunday Challenge, I drew and painted my headphones. I had to think a bit before I settled on painting them. At first I had wandered around the house looking for something that was common and interesting. After a few minutes, I realized that I don’t have many knickknacks of interest, except maybe my old California license plates. But, painting a flat rectangle didn’t seem interesting or challenging. I finally settled on my headphones because the coiled cord appealed to me. Here’s what I came up with.
Since my children’s picture book will be printed as an 8x8-inch square, I need an image that is two 8-inch squares side by side, with a bit of extra space for the bleed and for the spine. I decided to create an 8000x4000px image. Procreate will allow 12 layers for an image that size. I could have made a smaller image — say 6000x3000px — but I want to make sure that I have lots of headroom pixels to play with. With an 8000x4000-pixel image, I could conceivably go up to 26-inches square — that would be a hella big children’s book. However, for my purposes, having the extra resolution means that I won’t have to redraw this image to increase the resolution.
I started roughing out the image today. I used the camera in my iPad to take a picture of the thumbnail, then I the photo into Procreate. Once there, I scaled it up to fit the 8000x4000 image. I’ll have to figure out how to fit the title text on the page, that’s for sure.
Through my day job I have access to Lynda.com. I found a course called “InDesign: Creating Fixed-Layout EPUBS”. It’s a three-hour course that targets what I need to do with InDesign: create an EPUB. It’s a course that would have saved me many hours of frustration.
Today was a balmy, sunny day perfect for a Vitamin D Club outing. As the other member of the club basked in the sun, I retired to the shade and did some doodling…rough doodling of what’s supposed to be a Jaybird and a Monarch butterfly on the wing to Mexico. I’m thinking of my next book.
72/365
This my backup drawing. My pen and ink drawing sucked so bad that I tried to fix it in Photoshop and made it worse, a thousand times worse. So, I scanned my sketch book at a high resolution and cleaned up the coffee stains and chicken scratches. That’s all I can say about my progress today. I’m going to go take a shower now.
