The De-Evolution of Older Work

Searching for a file today I came across my old folder for Honey Badgers. Thought it might be interesting to post the evolution or de-evoultion as it stands here. From the Finished image with layout and design(above).

Watercolor illustration(above) before the Art Director put her stamp on it…Helen Robinson is a brilliant designer!

I do all of my final black and white drawings on a hodge-podge of tracing paper. Above is the step before I transfer this onto a sheet of watercolor paper.

And finally…really should be firstly…the initial sketch. Probably about 3″x5″ on a sheet of copy paper. And there we have it folks. Now onto actually doing work rather than just blogging about it.

As Seen on crosshatchers.com

In With The (slightly) Old

Sometimes it take a bit of stewing inside the dark realm that is a flat file. It’s a place where good drawings, jobs, commissions, stories, usually go to die. Anyway, I’ve been writing away at a story that I really like but have not been able to see as I go along. I can usually see the images in my head as I’m writing a story…not this one.

So after a day of pacing around in a very tight circle…rooting around in my flat files…sipping coffee and thinking…I found it. I will use this guy as the protagonist. I have always liked him. Maybe this is how I give him a bit of life under that bunny hat.

Stickfiguratively Speaking-Sleepy Hollow

And finally–We are have the beginnings of the next in the Stickfiguratively Speaking series. THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW! I’m not gonna post too many here–just a glimpse. But I am gonna do a Timothy Decker(ish) blog post and be very verbose.

The Title page as it stands now. I’ll need to do a bit more inking on this piece before I consider it finished. Also, the layout of the type will most likely change(as I am not designing this book–just drawing and writing the occasional bit).

So how am I making these illustrations, you ask? They are all pen and ink on bristol. All about 10″x20″ so they have become a bit of a monster in my life…lots of inky evenings and sleepless, inky nights. Closely followed by inky mornings.

Then comes the part that is not so fun…but much less inky. The images are scanned and then I take them into photoshop to block out the background black areas. My current idea is to at least have every section where the Headless Horseman is illustrated to be a night scene like these. Also, keep in mind that these images are not displayed in order–so the if you’re reading the words, it probably won’t make sense.

This is an example of a daytime scene. That lanky schoolmaster from Connecticut, lurching through a cornfield reading the books of Cotton Mather. I think that reading Mather was basically his version of watching a horror film by yourself. You do it because you kind of want to have that feeling in the back of your mind that everything you just saw could possibly be real. This is Ichabod Crane–a superstitions man living in a VERY superstitious time.

I just like how this one came out.

Lastly for today’s post–Many thanks to Rob at Washington Irving’s Sunnyside estate in Sleepy Hollow(or Irvington or Tarrytown) for providing me with reference pictures and letting me romp around the grounds taking pictures this past summer. It really allowed me to keep my head…heh.