Morning Buzz

 Let's talk about the most detailed, complex piece I've ever done. It's not the piece with like eight figures in a courtroom. It's not the piece with a cyborg woman crashing through a window fighting cyborg panthers. It's the picture of a grassy meadow and a salamander with a coffee and some bees.

Part of the complexity, I mean all of the complexity, comes from wanting to get the greenery right. Yeah, I could imply grass and leaves, and I did in the background, but I wanted the viewer to feel like they were in this grass. I love the look of sunlight shining through leaves, giving them this bright green/yellow glow. If I wanted to properly show those spots of sunlight, I was going to need to really pay attention to individual leaves. 

I found this really beautiful, twisted, moss-covered tree on one of our hikes through Clear Creek Metro Park. It has so much life in its shape and all the things growing out of it, and I thought, you know, this would make a really lovely image. So I did a color sketch.

You can see I had a slightly different creative direction for this one early. But I felt that, as much as I love dinosaurs, we needed a better sense of mystery and discovery. Would I like to discover dinosaurs in a metro park? 100% yes. BUT how much cuter would it be to have a little salamander soaking in a warm summer morning? So I made another color sketch.

This composition would be mostly flowers and leaves in a meadow. There is this nice big tree to anchor the piece, but we need a better defined foreground, middle ground, and background. I can establish a few things by putting some giant leaves and bees in the foreground: we get a good size comparison for the tree, a bold object to help draw us into the image, and overlap to keep the perspective from flattening out. 

The real challenge came not from determining the composition but filling in the leaves. These are essentially negative spaces: it's a meadow, so it is about the collection of thousands of leaves instead of individuals. But as the leaves get closer to the viewer, detailing them individually becomes more important to sell the environment. I didn't actually change the far background that much from this initial sketch. But how the hell am I going to paint leaves into the foreground without it looking like busy chaos? I'm not sure, honestly, but this is what I did.

First, I went back to the tree and shot some reference on a sunny day.

Then I outlined the spaces I needed to fill in my painting and took that shape outline over to the photo and moved it around until I liked the leaves inside of it. Then I traced the leaves in that outline and dragged the tracing back into my painting. This did two things for me: I was able to control what part of the reference I was looking at while painting, and I could control the value structure of the leaves I was painting. There were two value/color structures in the meadow, one for the shade and one for the sun. So I'd draw a shape over the sketch that represented the sun area, then take that shape and find leaves in the sun. Can you spot where I grabbed my reference?

Could I have found a better, more painterly way of filling in the meadow? Maybe. But while I started off painting willy-nilly, I was overwhelmed by the busy-ness of the lush greenery almost immediately. I needed to find structure, especially because I was already making sure to keep my eye on the bigger picture. The leaves in the shadow areas had to be detailed but couldn't stand out beyond the shadow. Similarly, each leaf, sunlight or no, needed to blend into the final image. They needed to be detailed enough to be believable, but not so detailed that the finer elements of my painting got lost. Forest for the trees, and all that. Did I succeed?

The bees, and especially the salamander, actually took the least amount of time. I redesigned the bees to look cuter and less sinister (something about those black pointy legs creeped me out), but the salamander actually stayed exactly the same as the sketch. I was happy with this simple contented smile and his little grippy hands, things that just worked from the sketch and I didn't want to mess up that energy by overpainting him. I spent the most time holding the overall design in mind as I tackled each piece, hyper-diligent to keep colors and highlights in their place depending on whether they were in the shade or the sunlight, background, foreground, or middle ground. This determined everything from value range to detail. 

Here's the starkest example, with foreground sunlight overlapping middle ground shade and background sunlight. The trees in the background needed just the right amount of detail to sell what they were, but primarily to accent the bees.

This is the part of the painting that almost drove me crazy. But once I started grabbing pieces of the reference that I liked and sort of puzzle-piecing them together, the process became much easier. If leaves were in the shade they had three values and two hues: some leaves had a warmer hue from echoing sunlight from surrounding leaves, others were cooler, getting their light by reflecting the blue sky. If the leaves were in the sunlight they had four values and two hues: if we were seeing the leaf from below, they would have a bright warm yellow hue because of the sunlight glowing through them. If we saw the top of the leaf, it had a cooler, whiter hue, since we were seeing the sun bouncing directly off of the leaf. It took a lot of meticulous, detail minded execution to get through this little section of meadow. 

This was one of the only places where the leaves were sparse enough that it was easy to show the difference between abstract soft background and sharper, brighter middle ground. This was probably one of the more fun parts of the painting to execute, oddly enough.

I painted the salamander last, which turned out to be a good idea. He didn't really need much to finish him, just a few sharp highlights so he looked a little slimy and a little rainbow on his cup. 

I tried to really push the brush texture and build around the color study itself to try and maintain some of the energy of the initial sketch. I painted this at 22x36, which means that any image I show online will be robbed of much of the texture the full size image has. So, sorry about that. You could always buy a print to see the texture better!

Anyways, hope you liked it, and my explanation of the process. I'll have more work to show soon!

Tom Sawyer Batch #4

I hit my limit. There was simply no way to do the work I needed to get done by the deadline. So I reached out to my fellow illustrator at McGraw Hill, Max Yeager, who stepped in and finished three out of five of the illustrations in this batch. I thought he did a great job taking the reference, sketches, and some of my previous illustrations to hit the same style so the illustrations would be seamless. I still lament not being able to get to these, I ended up giving him some of my favorite compositions, but I am deeply grateful to Max for helping me hit what turned out to be an impossible deadline.

If you want further proof of how hard this was to do, let's take a look at the first image I created for this batch. It was a lot of fun, but six portraits just plain take time.

The next piece is one of my favorites of the whole project, and a great example of what I was able to do with just the few extra hours Max bought me by jumping onto the project to help.

Max worked with me to understand what my vision was for these next pieces, and I'd say he did a bang-up job of bringing these scenes to life!

The second scene Max produced was difficult, not only because of the perspective, but the lighting, too. 

Finally, Max's third piece got out in the sunlight and he was allowed to put some color in! One of the things that made his inclusion so vital was that I was able to use the time he spent creating these images for all the other batches: reference, compositions, final touches, and of course that monster image with six portraits. 

You'll be seeing his work again throughout, he ended up producing six pieces overall, but I'd like to emphasize that with these three images, Max put his other work down and helped to save me from a project that was on the verge of blowing deadlines.

Tom Sawyer Batch #3

This batch was both where I hit my stride and where the work overwhelmed me. I had juggled each batch by putting in extra work in the color phase, because the rendering phase was simply too little time. But when each batch of illustrations started to overlap, that cushion disappeared. Now, I'm trying to finish last revisions on batch #2, render batch #3, and begin sketches and planning batch #4. Not to mention how complex some of these illustrations became! Overall, I think this batch is the most inconsistent. The speed I needed to work at actually pushed me to get some nice painterly effects. I'm especially proud of Outlaw Joe's hand here.

And Tom's expression and his curled hands here.

But some of that panic actually, counterintuitively, made me hyper-focus on trouble pieces, and they end up losing energetic brush strokes. These next two turned out to be some of my least favorite images. I wish I had many more hours on them, or maybe even a do-over. But, they got finished, and that's the most important part!

You can also see that the needs of the composition and the lack of time to plan it out made for some static design. Even though the clothing and maybe even the teacher's face look nice in this image, it lacks flow and focus.

That being said, I definitely felt like my process got hammered down, and it opened up future illustrations to really shine.

Tom Sawyer Batch 2

 Last post I talked about the help I got from my team and the trust that needed to be established with the writers and art directors. I mentioned that over the course of the next six batches, I found ways to fit my detailed, realistic style into scope, but didn't really show examples. That's because batch #2 was when I started to do a much better job of managing complex vs. simple, and implied vs. described. 

Here's a perfect example of simplifying and compromise. This is an image illustrating the first time Tom and Huck meet to make a trade, Tom trading his tooth for Huck's 'first of the season' tick. He also has a dead rat. I wanted to just have Huck in the scene, considering how thin the composition was, and completely forego a background. But the authors wanted Tom in the picture, and if Tom was there, it needed a background.

In the color phase, I added Tom into the image, and the direction was two-fold: give Tom a hat, and silo the image. In other words, fade the edges of the illustration out so there were no hard corners.

I focused on Huck, especially on his hands and face, and Tom's hand. Everything else was extremely expressionistic. This helped highlight the important parts of the image and, more importantly, bought me precious time for the other four images in this batch. 

That precious time was eaten up when other images went through multiple revisions. 

Tom and Becky flirting was a strangely difficult piece to get right. 

From sketch to color study to final revisions, it took a while to nail down everything this scene needed to show: the text on the slate, their flirting interactions, and the school house setting. 

Between the time I had and the needs of the book, something had to give. I simply couldn't add a whole classroom and children at the same fidelity as Tom and Becky within the deadline. And so, again, we found a design-forward compromise.

I think it's time to talk about the compositions of my work for this project. If you know my work, you know I kind of love a dutch angle. At the very least, I like to add perspective. For most of the paintings in this project, especially early on, there were two considerations I had to keep in mind: the first was expectations of the authors, the second was, of course, timeline. 

Fair or not, I came into the project with my own biases, and kept my early submissions extremely straightforward. Literally. The main characters where always center composition, horizon line was almost always in the middle of the page, and any architectural elements where always straight-on. This makes for more stagnate images, but it's also a lot faster to design and complete. I wasn't sure if the authors would be interested in more challenging designs, and it took a few batches of them seeing my work, and the consistency of my finals, for both of us to feel comfortable with more daring compositions.

There were early exceptions, however.

Even this example has the house in the background straight up and down. I was still hesitant to angle the roof too much in the foreground to enhance the perspective. Also, it's kind of amazing the conversations you get into about facial expressions. How do you show excitement but not outright happiness? Anticipation? 

Anger, surprise and fear are much easier, however!

This was the first piece where I really tried to mix up the formula. How do you fit five figures into a half-page and make all of their facial expressions readable? The expressionistic background for Huck, the woodgrain silo for Tom and Becky, the flat house-front for Tom's escape, all of those little time savers were made specifically to give me space for this piece. In most batches I had one or two stand-out images that I would spend more time on to really convey the importance of the moment in the story. 

Tom and Huckleberry do a lot of night time adventures and running away! I'll talk more about this one in the context of a later illustration. But in many ways I feel like this was the first draft of a later, better painting. 

At this point in the schedule, I'm working on three batches at once! There was no room to breathe, especially when the deadlines would overlap one another. It's in batch #3 when we'll see that pressure start to creep up on the deadlines as I look for extra production days anywhere I can find them.

Tom Sawyer Batch 1

 Let's start back at the beginning. 

This post is for those new to illustration or just curious about how the process works. I'll be sharing how I tackled a job of this size: the things I did to work within scope (ie: finding the right balance between 'Sistine Chapel' and 'children's crayon drawing'), and the steps from start to finish on individual illustrations. 

The first part of any project is building trust with your partners. In my case, I had two parties involved: MD (media designers, basically art directors) and AD (academic designers, content writers). I worked directly with the MD, who would route art requests (called specs) to me. When I had art to submit, they would send it to the ADs to critique and approve, then back to me, so on and so forth. 

Early on, AD had no idea what to expect from me when it came to final images. That trust had to be built, and especially with such a big project, the early stages were hard going. I know when parts of my sketches are just placeholders, but they don't. So sometimes during the sketch phase in the early parts of Tom Sawyer I would get asked to change major parts of the image because they weren't sure where I was going with it. 

For instance, when I sent them the first batch of illustrations, they didn't understand the halftones, thinking I had sent them final illustrations. "No, we wanted full color illustrations, these look too serious!"

Similarly, it took me time to learn exactly what they wanted. You'll see my work become looser and more comfortable as the project continued and we started to trust each other's visions.

This project was massive, 30 images overall, and the timeline was very small. Any freelancer knows that deadlines shift wildly depending on the project. I've known artists to have 24 hours to complete a piece, and I've personally gotten a cushy two months for one image before, but this timeline was four months for 30 images. That's sketches, color studies, photo shoots, and final rendering in 92 business days, or about 3 days per piece. Not ideal. 

But, prospective illustrators, you get hired to be visual problem solvers. Sometimes that problem is 'make my book character attractive and energetic.' Sometimes that problem is 'figure out how to make 30 illustrations in sixteen weeks.' 

Part of the challenge of creating so many images, especially fully rendered painterly images, is getting the right amount of detail without getting bogged down, or worse, making an image look inconsistent. With five images in every batch, time spent on one image would take from another, so it was constant triage. I learned a lot in a very short period of time about where I needed to concentrate my efforts.

I had a hidden weapon when it came to tackling this colossal task: I work in-house at McGraw Hill. That means that the book budget was my budget (as long as I didn't ask for too much!), so I was able to hire models and use a dedicated studio space for reference. I also rented costumes. :)

The MDs I worked with were in the same building so they were able to schedule shoot times and align them with project deadlines. That means on Monday I get specs, make quick composition sketches, Wednesday I shoot reference, and by Friday I have finalized sketches ready for color. This does put me at risk, and there were a few times I had to reshoot reference because they didn't like my initial composition, but overall this tactic worked nicely.

It was a big deal to have the help of a team while I picked away at this project. I also work with other illustrators so I could always lean over and ask for advice if I ever got stuck on a visual problem.

In my last post, I showed the steps that were scheduled for each spec, and the deadlines for them. 5 days for sketches, 8 for color, 4 for rendering, and 2 for revisions. This schedule was set up for artists who don't render nearly as much as I do, so I would usually take some of those 8 days for color and render instead. 

This piece, for instance, took eight hours to render (minus revisions). Getting simpler images out of the way quickly helped pave the way for multiple full figure illustrations later down the road! After all, for batch #1, I actually had 5 more illustrations due after this one!

Here comes the boring part: I had to stay super organized. in the end, I had over 500 reference photos and every _revision, _revision_02, _revision_03_recovered file to keep track of across files across batches. It pays to set up an easy to navigate file system, regardless of how big your project may be. That desktop will become a black hole and suck every half-finished project you've ever made into the ether.

Boring part done, let's look at the rest of the illustrations!

In the end, after all the help and the trust and the scheduling, the only thing that kept my work sharp and on target was reference. Good, solid reference. If it were up to me, I would have traveled to Mark Twain's boyhood home in Missouri and taken all the pictures I could, but alas, 'what if we used our vacation to shoot reference for my work' wasn't a great sales pitch. The fact that I was able to find excellent kid models and schedule a shoot for every batch was a life saver. 

Looking back on this first batch, I can see the places where I was still unsure, still building confidence in myself and a truncated production schedule, and still building confidence with my partners. As time went on, and the asks got bigger, I found a rhythm to the work and a better instinct for what details could go and which were needed to sell the image.

Illustrating Tom Sawyer

Some very exciting news I've been sitting on for a while: I got to illustrate Tom Sawyer for McGraw Hill Education! It's included in their 2021 Reading Mastery Transformations K-5 program, which is a reading intervention program. You know what's crazy about that? I was in a reading intervention program for a short time in fifth grade, where I read a part of Tom Sawyer and illustrated it for an assignment! I still remember drawing the wood grain on the pulpit in a church scene.

30 illustrations, 92 business days, over 500 reference photos, and close to 1000 hours of painting and drawing. Every photo and sketch and final psd stacked together weighs 13.8 gigabytes. This was the most challenging (and fun) project I've ever worked on. 

Each batch of illustrations would release every two weeks, and there were reviews scheduled after every step. Once I finished sketches, for instance, I would have to wait for the review. The feedback on those images would come in the middle of the sketch phase for batch two, but instead of pushing deadlines out, they would layer over each other. Some weeks had me working on three batches at once! There were three things that got me across the finish line: reference, a very regimented schedule, and my team at McGraw Hill. Among other things, my manager bought precious days late in the project, and Max Yeager, a fellow illustrator, jumped on to complete six illustrations in the home stretch when everything really stacked up. 

Tom, Huck, and Becky were professional child models. They were great! The rest of the players you see here were coworkers (remember when I said I couldn't do it without them?). Man, I miss being in the office with my friends.

So let's show some actual work, yeah? 

Sketch to block in composition so I can shoot reference.

Final sketch for review.

Color blocking.

Final.

I'll be sharing finals and some process shots over the next few days, I hope you enjoy the work!

Two more just because I like them so much: