Photoshopping

One of the biggest challenges in illustration (or biggest frustrations, depending on how I feel towards it!) is photoshopping my work. The hardest thing to do is making the image scanned in look as close as possible to the actual illustration.

Now, there are BILLIONS of photoshop classes online telling you techniques, but the majority of these techniques are for photographs. Obviously, I don't care as much about photography as I do for drawings and so forth. It's taken a lot of trial and error to fix my work, but hopefully it shows. If any interested, I can share how to correct illustration work in photoshop.

Mood Swings

A bad habit that I got into last year was expecting every drawing to be perfect, but I continuously found faults and errors in the drawing. I would labor away and waste hours and hours over drawing after drawing to get the perfect something. It was kinda like beating my head against a wall.

With these simple illustrations, I am trying to limit myself to just one illustration a day done within a half hour to an hour. This is so I don't place too much emphasis on these drawings, and if there are problems in the drawing, who cares, learn from it, and move on.

Alas, the perfectionist in me says "that's not right! that's not right!" and I ended up doing a number of drawings again looking for that perfect line. I became so angry that the end result was Larry Bear being really really frustrated. Which I hope shows through the brushwork and color.

Peter Reynolds

Peter Reynolds is a picture book illustrator that my agent turned me to a month or so ago. Although I have seen his work and looked at it on a few occasions, I did not realize how much I was missing out on. The fluidity of his artwork is amazing and the expressiveness of his drawings is lively. For me, my favorite artists are ones that I keep revisiting time and time again. I find myself doing that more with Peter Reynolds art. Then I drew some with his drawings in mind.

More Sketches

More sketches with a sketch of Mooch. People will say that my work looks like this, which is understandable. I hope in the future I can move further away from these influences.

jump ropes and oven mitts

Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast

Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast is a great blog on children's book illustrations and anything related. The greatest part too is a vast history of different interviews, images, and information which I find invaluable. I hope people enjoy it as much as I do.

Cool Birds

For a story based off the kittens' mittens nursery rhyme. These are birds though.

Terry Rex again

Artie

Terry Rex

Looking back at the past year, I've noticed that I've been in a huge creative rut. A lot of writer's blocks, the inability to draw anything, and so on and so forth. It was very debilitating, and would explain the lack of artwork that I've been able to put online.

Since taking vacation and moving into a different job position, my life seems more sane now and fortunately, I've been able to write and draw more prolifically. I hope that with these changes and a new regimen in my creativity, I hope to have more work.

Here's a T-rex.