Finally, More Frog Prince

Been away from this one too long, but that's what major home renovation will do to you.

Page 15 was a collaborative effort with my wife. She liked the drawing, but the expression on the princess' face just didn't say "Ew, yucky" to her. I thought about changing the expression by adding eyebrows, but it just didn't work. Then we came up with just changing the shape of the whites of her eyes, which is such a fun solution I may revisit some of the older ones to see if it would apply to any of them.

More Frog Prince

Arianna looks over my shoulder when I'm working on these, and from the sound of it she's likely to enjoy the book when it's finished. She recognizes herself and says "Princess Moy Moy!" over and over while I work. She also says she likes it! Good incentive to keep going.

Another good incentive is the feedback. Got a couple comments on the princess conceding to the frog on page 11, so I decided to change it (and update the picture) appropriately. Also, my wife reminded my that Arianna says "Ew, yucky!" a lot, and suggested that I add it to the princess' denials. So that made it into today's entry, as well as being backdated to the last one too.

More Frog Prince

Interludes upon interludes

And now, a short break from my short break from Hansel and Gretel. Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year (the year of the tiger) fall on the same day this year, so I just had to do a card that included both. I left it up on the computer so that my wife could find it this morning.

I would feel like I'm wasting the chance to market a perfectly good holiday card here, except for the tiny fact that the likelihood of the year of the tiger and Valentine's Day occurring together again is pretty small for the next century or so. But in 2110 or whenever, I'll be so ready with this card.

But I've been working on the Frog Prince as well, so I'll be back to interrupting Hansel and Gretel in no time.

More Frog Prince

The Frog Prince continued

The next three pages of the bedtime book. Working in this style has been really interesting for me. At first, it was maddening. I want shadows! I want dimension! I want perspective! But now that I'm half a dozen in, I'm getting into it. Especially as it's computer art, I can play with the composition more. I don't even bother to scan in sketches to draw from. I make each element, and then move them around, even more easily than if I'd used my sketchbook. Granted, for me at least, composing a picture in this way would only work with something rendered in this style. But it gives me a chance to make the compositions more creative, more so than if I had tried to paint it.

The other thing I've noticed helps with composition is saving it for the blog. As an icon, it's really small, so things like the composition, or flaws therein, stand out even more (in traditional art, I have to get this same effect by walking across the room from the painting, so I can see it at a distance).

This is working for my painting as well – since I've been scanning in the steps of the Hansel and Gretel piece, I get to see it in the same way. Ordinarily, it's would be too bothersome to scan in steps of a painting to check it out, but since I'm doing so anyway for the blog, it's just as helpful. In particular, when I posted the last version, I could see that the top leaf line of the trees is almost a straight line. I'll be adding more layers of foliage beneath it when I go back to working on it, but I'd never have noticed if I hadn't seen it in blog icon form.

Another (hopefully brief) Interlude

Every night, Arianna likes me to read Byron Barton's The Three Bears to her, and it's easy to see why. It's colorful. It's pithy. And it has enough repetition for a 2-year old to follow along and say it with me while I'm reading it. So we do so. Every. Single. Night.

Notwithstanding, it is a fun book, and my only complaint is that there aren't more fairy tale books like it. Barton has other books, but they're mainly cars, trucks, and dinosaurs. But I was wishing that there were more story books like that one.

And then I thought, I can fix that.

So here are the first three pages of my take, toddler-art style, on the Frog Prince, one of my favorites as a child:






It'll end up being a 24-page book in the end, at least in this version. If I tried to take it to a publisher, it would probably have to be 32 pages, but I'm comfortable with the length now. After all, it is to help put a 2-year old to sleep – no need to write a novel.

Back into the Woods

Progress! Nowhere near finished, of course, but a far cry from a doodle on lined notebook paper.

I've always pictured Hansel and Gretel being turned out of the house in Autumn. It seems like a particularly nasty time to abandon someone. Not a flat out death sentence like the middle of winter, true, but in late fall, after harvest time, when they have a tantalizing hope of finding food but they most likely can't or the stepmother wouldn't have turned them out of the house to begin with. Abandoned just at the right time to let them starve first and then have the cold finish them off.

Clearly I have strong opinions about how bad the stepmother is in this story.

But it does make for a nice fall palette in the painting.

We interrupt Hansel and Gretel...

...for a quick contest entry. The New Yorker just recently wrapped up their third annual "Redraw Tilley" contest (Eustace Tilley is the New Yorker's logo guy – if you go to the contest site, you'll see what he looks like). I found out about it so close to the deadline that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to get an entry in under the wire, but fortunately I did. No word on the winners yet (they can pick up to 12). But check out the other entries – sure, there are some not-so-professional attempts, but there is also a lot of great art there as well. There's even some that weren't drawn so well, but were fantastic ideas. My favorite in that last category is the one of Tilley as Batman. If that had been rendered better, and the batsignal had been shining where the butterfly usually goes, I would have picked that one for a winner.

And now a quick rant about professionalism. The one thing that bugs me is how many pieces are entered multiple times, with tweaks or color changes or titles added later. In my opinion, you ought to get it to a complete finish first, and not swamp the contest pages with revisions or slightly different variations (in particular, the one hailing the cab, in I-lost-count-of-how-many-variations, really annoys me). I say, make it as good as you can, and just post it already. Overly cranky on my part, I know, but that's the illustrator in me. If you've got an illustration client, you don't hand them a dozen versions of the final and say, "I don't know, which of these do you think is okay?" That's comp stuff – not finals.

Enough ranting – back to my entry. This isn't totally off the Hansel and Gretel theme I've got going here. I came up with the idea as I was thumbing through my sketchbook, trying to find an unused page, and passed by my witch sketch for the story. I liked the idea of Tilley as a witch so much that I forget what I was going to sketch if I had found the blank page first.

Hansel and Gretel - in process

I needed to get a new post put up – while I like my Santa image, in our house the Christmas decorations come down the day after the holiday, so it is way past time to put up something else.

While I don't have anything finished yet, I have been toying with illustrating Hansel and Gretel for a while. Not for any particular reason, it's just that the story conjures up a lot of imagery for me. And while randomly doodling (you can see it's on notebook paper) I came up with this drawing – Hansel and Gretel coming across the very stuffed and happy bird that ate up all their bread crumbs. The finished piece will be titled "Sorry, Were Those Yours?"

More on this to come, as I take it to a tight sketch and then a finished painting.