Paisley Rabbit Cover, Leaf By Leaf (Part 1)

The approved rough design for the book cover

Last week I started work on the final painting for the book cover of Paisley Rabbit and the Treehouse Contest. Naturally this is one of, possibly the most important illustrations for the book, so I decided to enlarge the painting even further than normal to give me maximum room to create a really detailed and luscious watercolour illustration. Now, as I am still in the process of throwing paint at paper, there is no guarantee the finished piece will be luscious, at least I have given myself plenty of room to succeed (or fail).

As I type this, I'm probably not even halfway through the painting so I could be documenting a monumental flop. However I'm going to risk airing my underwear in public and if you don't like what you see, you can always 'unfollow' me and set fire to your PC, laptop, or whatever device you view the great worldwide web on.

Exhibit A - fuzzy photo of fuzzy pencil line

Above is the line drawing on stretched watercolour paper (Arches HP). Before I begin painting, I always email an image of the linework to my client to make sure no major changes are needed and I am good to proceed with colour. After all, pencil is much easier to erase than paint!

This linework is slightly different than normal in that I have been very selective in what I choose to outline. Normally I would treat the whole area of the image the same and outline all the aspects of the composition. However if I were to be so thorough and draw every single leaf, you can imagine how much longer the process would take. Instead I opted to draw the leaves that were pivotal to the cover (such as those interacting with Paisley Rabbit and where the title box would appear) and leave space for the others that would gradually appear organically from the shapes I created with the watercolour.

Wet-in-wet watercolour fun

Once the pencil drawing was approved, I began wetting the whole surface of the painting and then grabbed a large flat brush and started to slap lots of Prussian blue, cobalt blue, cadmium yellow and lemon yellow around the paper. This is my favourite stage in most paintings as I start to see things emerge as the wet colours interact. I juggle between what naturally happens with the paint and how my reference is telling me what the tree should look like.

During a reference trip in October I found this great oak near my home

This ivy was climbing up a gatehouse at Stourhead. I took this photo nearly 7 years ago!

Blocking in - choosing what to put in and 'leave' out.

After the wet-in-wet stage, I dried the paper with a hair dryer and started to block in the basic shapes and colours for the whole image. For this I used the same colours and also scrubbed out lots of paint too, especially where the blue sky was too dark and thus competing with the leaves for attention (I should have refrained from using cobalt blue!). I'm very concerned about creating depth in this image as the composition is very cropped with a very shallow depth of field.

The next job is to block in the basic colours for Paisley Rabbit and the birds (flycatchers). Once they are reasonably defined, I will return to the tree and really work hard on developing darker tones and form in the branches and upper leaves.

Until next time...

Public Finance Magazine Cover

A blast from the not so distant past. I was given the a brief to create the phrase 'In The Pipeline' (the question mark was added later on) using about 5 stock images of pipes. Below you can see the trials and tribulations I went through trying to get the words to be legible and still all join together realistically.

The first attempt, took a lot longer than I expected and I hadn't accounted for perspective when I said yes to the deadline, even a single pipe with a different viewpoint to all the others would stand out and ruin the overall effect. I had to do endless amounts of cloning and jiggery pokery in Photoshop, the screw caps and joins were a godsend for hiding an perspective or pipe-join issues

Above you can see the second version which now has corrosion on the copper pipes and they have also been darkened in the hope of bringing the PVC pipes forward. It worked to an extent but the art director wanted another solution so...

...the copper pipes were removed and the white PVC was sprayed bright yellow. I also painted in a few cracks and leaks and changed the question mark period to a plughole.

Visit coverjunkie to see the final illustration on the cover.

This may not be my usual style but I enjoy trying something new especially when it's successful.

Interview for HOW Magazine

I would have posted this much earlier but I didn't know the interview was published, I must check earlier next time. To read the short interview click here.

And Now For Something Completely Different...

Last year I had the pleasure of working for Facility Management World Magazine. The brief was to create an illustration made up of 13 reasons to look forward to 2013 if you work in the facilities sector such as, award winning developments, the momentum of the Olympics and renewable energies. Each reason had to be illustrated and then group together on a (nearly) isometric platform. I had a lot of fun with a pencil working out how to group everything together into a coherent composition and by the time I had a suitable drawing the Art Director decided he wanted it to go on the cover. Smiles all around and then the thought, I hope I can pull this off!  

I powered up Adobe Illustrator on my laptop and got to work tracing out the platform, painstakingly trying to keep the perspective tight. After that it was into Photoshop to add colour on separate layers so I could adjust the colour schemes easily. I ended up with orange (above) and green (below, just in case you're colourblind).

Next came the figures which I sketched out in pencil then finished off in Photoshop and then arranged with the appropriately coloured shadows in the illustration. In the end I had four versions to show the magazine, orange, green, orange with sparkly bulbs on '2013' and green with (you guessed it) sparkly bulbs on '2013'.

In the end FM World went with the orange illustration with bulbs on and I think they made 2013 black. I now know if I get asked to do something similar again I won't have any problems.

Here's some artwork.

After asking the Art Director I can now show you some artwork for the BBC audiobook (see previous post). The top image is my illustration done hopefully in a similar style to the two below. After studying the previous covers I decided to work up an acrylic underpainting to imitate the use of ink and then block in with watercolour.