Month: December 2016

Who Were The Wright Brothers?

Penguin

Continuing with my ongoing plan to post all the illustrations from the ‘Who Was’ series, on a month by month basis. This was the third project that I worked on for Penguin Young Readers in 2013 (after the Laura Ingalls Wilder book, and the Lewis & Clark cover, but before I did the Lewis & Clark interiors). ‘Who Were the Wright Brothers?’ required approximately 80 illustrations of varying sizes for the interior of the book. I’ve posted a sampling of illustrations from this book in the past, but here is the entire collection. Next month I’ll be sharing the illustrations for “Where Was The Panama Canal”, which was a book that I worked on almost concurrently with this one.










December Book Project

Baker Book House

Nearing the end of 2016, and, as promised, here’s the illustrations I’ve spent most of December working on. This was for a book project for Baker, a young reader’s edition of ‘The God Smuggler’ (about a man who spends his life smuggling bibles behind the iron curtain). 30 black and white full page illustrations in a pen and ink cross hatching style. This is a style that I began using when I first started illustrating full time in 1989, but fell by the wayside in lieu of the more popular cartoon and scratchboard styles. These past few years, though, it has had a resurgence in popularity with my clients, especially for book publishing projects.






December Update

Dover

Been spending most of December working on a book project of 30 illustrations (I’ll have samples to share on this project next week, I’m currently about 2/3 done with it), plus several assorted smaller odds n ends projects. The two illustrations shown here are a few book cover designs I’ve been doing for Dover’s reprints of classic fiction (‘Amistad’, above and ‘Red Badge of Courage’ below, in a slightly different style). These will all be printed with two color covers, and I’m hoping to experiment with various styles for these, and I’ll try to post some examples of how they were used, once they show up on Amazon. Meanwhile, a couple other books in the works for the coming year, and mostly things are starting to wind down a little for the holidays.

Danger Zone

Uncategorized

thezone

Normally, I enjoy the experience of ‘dropping into the zone’ when illustrating. (you lose track of time, become engrossed in the act of drawing, almost a zen-like out of body experience) Unfortunately, what happened today, was that I had a particularly challenging cityscape illustration to draw for an upcoming book project, and at the outset, picked the wrong file for a ‘size template’ and ended up drawing the entire thing at 600 dpi instead of my usual 300 dpi (like the rest of the 30 or so illustrations in this project). It never occurred to me during the hours I spent working on this one that it was taking twice as long as usual. I realized my mistake only at the end, and then I had to go back and redraw the entire illustration at the correct size. I hate to waste the effort, so here’s the ‘extra detailed version’, and I’ll be posting more samples from this book next week, along with the ‘redo’.