Snippet of watercolour by way of celebration

Underlying watercolour.
The original plan was to have all watercolour- but I was way behind- so I decided watercolour colour and black photoshop lines.
The watercolour alone is nicer but I didn't trust myself given the time (seeing as this is my first traditonal media book).
Next time.....

Little Bad Wolf ...prettty much done

Hooray

Little Bad Wolf- cover lines.

A few versions in lines of the cover for Little Bad Wolf-
Riffs on the main front cover idea- with me  trying to decide who's on the back.

There was a whole round of roughs before it.
and a whole series of last minute shenanigans as a commitee descends
and attempts to design after the fact-

or the colour as the case may be.

Little Bad Wolf- watercolours on spare drawings

Need to add the black lines to make  them match the rest of the book.
I did have the black lines- but when I was closing photoshop I didn't save the file ( I thought I had already and thought it was doing its 'save changes' when you hadn't really changed anything)

Mystery Museum

Materialises.

Done in about 3 and a half days- (stark contrast to the current book unfortunately).
I loved the chance to do some older fantasy sort of pictures for kids.
A direction I'd like to go.

(A shame so much was cropped out and shaded out on the back- again doing the front and back in an afternoon before I knew what words were going to be on the back.)

At the launch on Tuesday a lot of the kids said how much they loved my illustrations and how close the drawings were to their ideas
...which is a relief.
The stories the kids did were very interesting to try drawing.

The launch was one of the most lavish I've ever seen with pastries everywhere!

A Very Dalek Christmas

Idea for Dalek Christmas cards or a book while sitting at my table at Supanova

Quickly added Christmas Cheer

I bought Dragonframe- a stop motion program.
Man it is so cool.
There's a lot of the stop motion craft I don't know-
especially camera stuff- but I can easily see that so much has been thought out in the program- a weird and novel  delight to see in software.
I think the beauty of stop motion is that even if it is "craptastic" - somehow watching it you forgive any technical deficiencies.
Anyway- makes me feel like a kid again....
which is nice.

Also bought Autodesk sketchbook- I only have photoshop CS5 but as a drawing program it sucks mightily- primarily because of the appalling jaggies/aliasing/stepping as it reads your pen stroke.
Hadn't occurred to me how singularly bad it is until I've recently tried:
Sketchbook
Mischief
Manga Studio
Painter
and none of them have the same problem/suck so much.

Actually sketchbook has piqued my interest in concept art again- and plain drawing - so again excited to give it a go with the new tools.

Did a very quick replacement dinosaur for the banner.
Added a hat for christmas.

Mystery Museum Mk2

Another attempt at the cover. Also a very fast attempt/idea for a back cover.
Both need a bit of photoshop love I'm afraid but ...here they are...
Had thought to do a page of shading/dark/vignette in watercolour and composit it over both in pshop.
Speaking of pshop I need to pull my finger out and learn manga studio etc so i can leave pshop behind-
I hate it.

Mystery Museum

Warg woman

Highlight of this for  me is the colour of the wargs snout believe it or not.

Quetzalcoatl

Book Expo drawings and paintings

 A few unfinished ones here- ones I sort of started then gave up
or thought  "this bit has to dry" and put it aside then never came back to it.

 A bit rude this....but then if its good enough for Norman Lindsay to do these sort of things.....

Little Bad Wolf.

Woefully behind I feel- my replacement cintiq pen arrived today.
Thankfully it worked/cintiq works so I don't have to face the loss of $3000 piece of equipment.
But I have been trying to test with watercolour and find some colours I'd like to use.

Here is an example.

Tinkering

added a bit more- 
this watercolour paper buckles badly and I'm too lazy to stretch it (too used to those watercolour blocks)- so I keep making mistakes with fine stuff on all the up and downs of the buckles.

Dodgy troll

New cintiq pen still hasn't arrived-
will it all work when it does?  :(

Girl

Crow

Reasons to be cheerful.....

Halloween comes early.

Mini Fenrir

An extrapolation of that fox image and style
- I sort of like the rough brushstroke with the large brush.
Trying to love the rough.

Again a bit  more children's book-ish than my usual childrens book look.

Faun

In progress- scanned it in so far.

Getting a steadier hand I think when it comes to the tiny tiny eyes.
Again you can see my detailed under drawing....haha