New Book, and Fangbone! update...

Today I started drawing a new picture book written by David Friend.  I haven’t worked on a picture book since 2010, so I’m really excited to get rolling.  It’s a truck book, so that was a terrible joke. 

The first thing that most illustrators do when creating a book, is sketch the whole thing out on one large piece of paper.  This way it’s easier to break up the text, and get a sense of what the whole thing will look like.   I also start looking for good compositions to emerge.  The picture below was just my first pass. There will be many, many more…

People keep asking about the Fangbone! TV show.  I wish I had some answers myself.  The stuff I do know, I can’t share.  Things are looking good though. The waiting at this point is very, very difficult, and it would crush me if the project fell apart this late in the game.  I’m trying to stay positive, which actually is not my default setting and it takes a great deal of effort.  And cake.  Cake helps.

This is a scan from my 2001 picture book, “The Pie is Cherry.”  Sadly, it is no longer in print.

Astronaut #18

Here's the same image as yesterday, this time the lines were drawn with a brush.  I tried a very different color scheme, and I think it works well.

Astronaut #17

Here's a new astronaut piece.  I was trying to see how little line I could get away with and still allow  the image to work.  While I intended it to look very light, as if it was drawn in a few moments, the line looks a bit too stuff.  It's amazing how something as simple as line quality can make, or break a drawing.  This was a good experiment, but I have some ideas on how to improve this, and play more to my strengths.