Illustration Friday - Separated

I've been very busy getting ready for one more holiday craft fair so I only had time to do a quick sketch for this week's word which is 'Separated.' I'm not sure what made me think of this idea, other than that I know how painful it can be to be separated from an animal that you love.

At one point in the development of this sketch, I had the mother looking very mean and perturbed by her child's behavior. But I decided to go back to a more worried looking mom.  You can see the sketch of the mean mom below.

SALE in my Etsy Shop

I am currently having a Cyber Monday Sale in my Etsy shop.  Through midnight tonight (November 28th) you can receive 15% off of your entire purchase by entering the code CYBERMONDAY15 at checkout. In my shop you can find prints of my work, bookmarks, jewelry (including men's tie tacks and cuff links), greeting cards (Christmas, holiday, easter, Valentine's Day, birthday and thank you cards) and a selection of vintage items, including some beautiful mid-century aprons.

Below are just a few of the items you'll find in my shop, which you can find at: http://www.etsy.com/shop/vpauld

reproductions of vintage Christmas cards

glass tile pendant and snake chain necklace

typographic print of a George Burns quote

Reading Bear bookmark

12 pack of notecards featuring my Celestial Creature designs

glass tile pendant

glass tile pendant

werewolf cuff links

vintage costume jewelry

vintage mid-century apron

Illustration Friday - Vanity

It seems like ages since I've posted anything new in this blog. It's been a busy month, getting ready for several craft shows, designing and making new things, running my Etsy shop and working on an entry for Tomie dePaola's SCBWI contest have taken up most of my time.

This week's word for the 'Illustration Friday,' challenge is "Vanity." I really had hoped to create something new to illustrate the word, but once again I feel pressed for time, so, I dug up an illustration I did for 'Instinct' magazine's health column back in 2005. I believe the article that accompanied the illustration was about men's hair loss and products on the market that claim to slow it down.

As someone who is bald himself, I can understand the desire to try out hair loss remedies. If there was a magic pill that was 100% effective and worked without side effects to give me back all the hair I had as a youth, I'd certainly take it. Why? Because I guess I'm vain. Isn't that why most people use beauty products, wrinkle removers and similar concoctions that claim to make a person look young again, because of vanity? Everyone wants to look their best, so there's nothing wrong with a little vanity. If nobody cared about how they looked, it certainly wouldn't be pleasant to go out for an evening on the town. No one enjoys looking at a bunch of slobs when they go out for a nice dinner. Now that I've been bald for almost half my life, I've learned to accept the fact that I'll never see myself with a full head of hair again. That doesn't mean I don't miss my hair, it just means I'm not going to throw away my life savings trying to pursue dreams of a youthful appearance. Besides being bald has its advantages, I don't ever have to worry about waking up with 'bed head' hair.

I managed to find the original sketch I submitted to the art director and one of the initial stages of the painting. You can see both of those below. Most of the painting was done in Corel Painter and the textures and lighting effects were then added in Photoshop.

the digital watercolor sketch I sent to the art director for approval

An early stage of the painting before the shading was blended and before the textures were added.

Illustration Friday - Scattered

Click on image to see it larger.

Walking my dog, I see lots of squirrels. My dog has a squirrel obsession, so we often end up following them. I would never let my dog catch a squirrel (at least not intentionally) but I do let her 'be a dog,' and engage in her instincts by allowing her to track them up into a tree. Once the squirrels are safely sitting in the trees above us, my dog is perfectly content to sit beneath the tree and stare up at them for as long as I will allow her to do so. Some of the squirrels are quite brave and will climb part way back down the tree to check us out. I always have my camera with me so while my dog is fixated on the squirrel, I try and take pictures of them.

One thing I notice while standing under the squirrel-laden trees is how many acorns and leaves are scattered about on the lawn. So, when I read that this week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge was the word "Scattered," I decided to do something with squirrels and scattered acorns.

I started out by doing some sketches based on a couple of the squirrel photos I had taken. At this point I wasn't sure in what direction I was going to take this image, but I kept sketching. As I worked on it, I decided I would do an image of a mother squirrel who has discovered that her son has scattered their acorns all over the floor of their den.

I finally decided I would put clothes on the squirrels. You can see at this stage I also decided to change the position of the mother squirrel's arms.

I thought the female squirrel looked too young and not at all like the mother of the other one, so in order to age her, I gave her a few extra pounds and put her in an apron.

At this point, it was just a matter of shading things in. I created the image entirely in Corel Painter 12. For the most part I used the 'Real 2B Pencil' brush, but for the background, which I created on a separate layer, I used the 'Real Sumi-e Wet Brush.'

I decided that I wanted to make the mother appear to be backlit so I added another layer and created some darker shading.  Once I had the shading the way I wanted it, I collapsed the various layers I had created so that it would be easier to do blending and smoothing out of the overall image.

How Would You Hibernate? - Illustration Friday

This week, the word challenge for 'Illustration Friday' was "Hibernate." In announcing the challenge, the host of the site provided this quote from Anais Nin: 

"You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death."

Hibernate detail

This is not how I picture hibernation. First of all, I don't think of it as a restless condition.  Restful, yes, but not restless. An absence of pleasure? I suppose that would be true if you define hibernation as withdrawing from life. My idea of hibernating is to stay in bed, which can be a most pleasurable thing to do, especially if one has a good stack of books at the bedside. I suppose my idea of hibernation is probably closer to the concept of cocooning. In other words, not going anywhere, staying inside surrounded by the things that comfort you. 


When I think of hibernation, I always think of bears. So, in my illustration I have depicted a bear, cozy in bed with a couple of stacks of books. He's not quite ready to hibernate yet, he wants to spend some time reading first. I've also given him a pal - down at the foot of the bed, is a little mouse with his own blanket and pillows and even his own books (see detail at right, click on images to see them larger).

I created this image in Corel Painter 12 and I worked in a slightly different manner than I have in the past. First of all, I spent more time on my pencil sketch. I did a number of sketches until I got the bear looking just right. Once I had the bear the way I wanted him to look, I tightened up the sketch and made a cleaner drawing. In the past, I've inked in my drawings, but this time I decided I would keep the sketch visible and not use any ink pens. Another thing I did that I don't usually do was to create selections so that I could paint in areas while protecting others. I created the selections by creating new alpha channels and painting the areas I wanted to protect in opaque white on the alpha channel.  Once I had the areas painted that I wanted to protect (think of this as applying a frisket mask to watercolor paper), it was easy to load and save these areas as selections. 

First sketch

Second Sketch

Third Sketch

Fourth Sketch

Fifth Sketch

Final Sketch

Starting to paint, I protected certain areas by using selections created from alpha channels

Screen shot showing selection

Almost done. I completed the illustration by adding some darks and some colored pencil details

How to Be Ferocious - Illustration Friday - Ferocious

For this week's 'Illustration Friday' challenge, which is the word "Ferocious," I stuck with the first idea that popped into my head, which was little children acting like ferocious beasts. I started off by doing some digital sketches using the 2B pencil brush in Painter 12. Originally I thought I would do a whole series of sketches, but I ended up just doing two which I then painted using Painter 12's new watercolor brushes (which I really like by the way).

I started out with a sketch of a child wearing a headband with attached animal ears.  A long, cloth belt tied around the waist makes a tail. He/She (at this point the sex hadn't been decided) is trying to scare a kitten. 

I then did another sketch, adding a boy in a similar pose but facing the opposite direction. 

As I began to refine the sketches, the first child turned into a little girl in her pajamas. She is imitating the lion that is depicted on her pajama top. The little boy is trying to frighten a puppy. As I refined him, I gave him pajamas with a dinosaur on the top and put him in slippers that looked like alligator heads. 

After finishing and cleaning up the sketches, I began painting them using Painter 12's new watercolor brushes. For painting the figures I used the Digital Watercolor 'New Simple Water' brush and the 'Coarse Mop Brush.' For the blue background, I used one of my favorites of the new brushes that come with Painter 12 - the Real Watercolor 'Fractal Wash' brush. This brush acts and looks like a real wet wash, and the speed at which it paints is greatly improved over previous versions. It's a great brush for adding a wet looking, fuzzy background.

At this point, I also added in another sketch of the first little girl, showing her sneaking up on the kitten. I liked the idea of showing a sequence, but it wasn't going to work with the image of the little boy and the dog, so I decided to split the illustration into two illustrations.  The boy and the dog now became a separate image.

Illustration Friday - Mesmerizing

I had several ideas for this week's 'Illustration Friday,' which this week is the word "mesmerizing." The idea I ended up using came to me while I was sitting in an auto-shop waiting room, waiting to get my oil changed and my tires rotated. There was a big screen TV in the room that was set to a channel playing old sitcoms. I had brought a book to read, but I had a hard time concentrating on it. The giant TV, which was showing an old episode of 'Bewitched,' was so mesmerizing that I found my eyes constantly drifting away from my book to look at the screen. Since there was no one else in the room, I finally got up and turned the sound down, which helped a little as far as concentrating on my book went.

So, from that experience I came up with the idea of a waiting room filled with children. All of the children in the room, with the exception of one little girl, find the TV to be mesmerizing. The child who is not watching the TV, is mesmerized by her book and would rather read.  This is my first image that I started and finished using the new Painter 12 upgrade (I did take a side trip into Photoshop to add some filters, but more about that in a minute).

Since it's small enough to fit in my pocket, I almost always carry my camera with me.  For this illustration I consulted a reference photo that I took while in the auto-shop waiting room (see photo at right). From there, I made a digital sketch. I knew I wanted to have the little girl and her book off to one side of the image, so I started by arranging the chairs and figures. After the initial sketch, I did another one where I refined the figures and darkened the lines.

Once I was happy with the sketch, I started doing some coloring. On a separate layer, I filled the canvas with a soft yellow color to give the image some overall warmth. Then, using the Digital Watercolor 'New Simple Water' brush, I began to color in the background and shapes. You can see my progress in the images below (Click on any image to see it larger).

As I worked, I created lots of layers so that I would have the flexibility of changing the opacity of different objects and adding special filters to some areas.  When everything was colored, I saved the image as a Photoshop file and then opened the image in Photoshop CS4.  In Photoshop, I used a third-party filter called Mister Retro (made by Permanent Press) to add some speckled texture to the various layers of color. The second to the last image in the progression (see below), shows the image with all of the coloring finished in Painter, prior to adding the filters. The last image in the progression shows a screen shot of the finished image, re-opened in Painter, after the Mister Retro photoshop filters had been applied. In this image, you can see all of the layers I created while working. I reopened the image in Painter in order to add some shadows on the little girl and under the chairs. I created the shadows on their own layer and painted them using Painter's Smart Strokes 'Textured Chalk' brush.

What Mesmerizes You? I.F. Mesmerizing

I had several ideas for this week's 'Illustration Friday,' which this week is the word "mesmerizing." The idea I ended up using came to me while I was sitting in an auto-shop waiting room, waiting to get my oil changed and my tires rotated. There was a big screen TV in the room that was set to a channel playing old sitcoms. I had brought a book to read, but I had a hard time concentrating on it. The giant TV, which was showing an old episode of 'Bewitched,' was so mesmerizing that I found my eyes constantly drifting over to look at it. Since there was no one else in the room, I finally got up and turned the sound down, which helped a little as far as concentrating on my book went.

So, from that experience I came up with the idea of a waiting room filled with children. All of the children in the room, with the exception of one little girl, find the TV to be mesmerizing. The child who is the exception, would rather read her book.  This is my first image that I started and finished using the new Painter 12 upgrade (I did take a side trip into Photoshop to add some filters, but more about that in a minute).

Since it's small enough to fit in my pocket, I almost always carry my camera with me.  For this illustration I consulted a reference photo that I took while in the auto-shop waiting room (see photo at right). From there, I made a digital sketch. I knew I wanted to have the little girl and her book off to one side of the image, so I started by arranging the chairs and figures. After the initial sketch, I did another one where I refined the figures and darkened the lines.

Once I was happy with the sketch, I started doing some coloring. On a separate layer, I filled the canvas with a soft yellow color to give the image some overall warmth. Then, using the Digital Watercolor 'New Simple Water' brush, I began to color in the background and shapes. You can see my progress in the images below (Click on any image to see it larger).

As I worked, I created lots of layers so that I would have the flexibility of changing the opacity of different objects and adding special filters to some areas.  When everything was colored, I saved the image as a Photoshop file and then opened the image in Photoshop CS4.  In Photoshop, I used a third-party filter called Mister Retro (made by Permanent Press) to add some speckled texture to the various layers of color. The second to the last image in the progression (see below), shows the image with all of the coloring finished in Painter, prior to adding the filters. The last image in the progression shows a screen shot of the finished image, re-opened in Painter, after the Mister Retro photoshop filters had been applied. In this image, you can see all of the layers I created while working. I reopened the image in Painter in order to add some shadows on the little girl and under the chairs. I created the shadows on their own layer and painted them using Painter's Smart Strokes 'Textured Chalk' brush.