flower heads and cake ladies

I did these sketches for what was maybe going to be a stationary set, but it didn't pan out.  What a bummer.  I hate it when that happens.  

The idea was that they would be black line art on white paper, and they would come with a little watercolor set and you could color them yourself.  

As far as the designs go, I was just having fun, really.  They are marker and pencil,sketches and they're not the best drawings, but they give you a pretty good idea.  I probably would have fancied them up with a brush pen if they it had been a go.  Brush pens are fun things. 

Things I like: flowers, fancy ladies, beautiful desserts, and the 18th century fashion.  If you couldn't tell.  

And then there was this weirdo one withe the octopus hair thrown in.  

I like markers a lot, even though my marker technique (if there is such a thing in the case of markers) is pretty 'whatever'.  

Frustrating days lately, you guys.  Really stupidly tough!!  I can't seem to get any projects off the ground, for reasons that are utterly mystifying (to me at least).  I don't wanna bitch out on my blog, because that's sort of yucky, but then again why not?  It's part of the deal when you're an artist that depends on other folks/institutions to put your work out there.  Your s#*% gets rejected sometimes!  

Anyway.  On to the next!

prep and landing

Well, this is a couple years late but better late than never, right?  Right.  It's starting to get a little Christmas-y, so this seems an appropriate time to post this schnazz!

A few years ago I was working at Disney as an intern or apprentice or disciple or fellow or whatever thing they call it now.  I'm pretty sure I spent most of my time there working on Prep and Landing, and I have a big fat pile of elf drawings to back up that assumption.  I dug them up, dusted them off, and here they are!

One of the first cracks I took at designing for the project was this line-up of elves.  I was really shooting to be a character designer back then, and when I look at these I remember why: that s#!% is FUN!

Unfortunately for me, I only have the print outs of these guys and not the actual files.  Way to not plan ahead, me.  I had to scan them and past them back together in p-shop, which is why their background is all funky.  Ah well.  

I have it on good authority that this line up is also in THIS book.  I haven't yet seen it with my own eyes!

I took a crack at designing some of the main characters too.  I think these little doodles of Magee are my favorite out of all of this work.  Her design in the final was pretty close to this, except less angry, and they didn't use my idea to have her coffee cup say "SHUT UP", but it still makes me laugh anyway.  

Typical of me, I got tea on one of my Magees.  Oerps.  

When this project started the things we were looking at for inspiration were old school stop-motion Christmas specials, you know the ones, Rudolph and such!  Paul Coker Jr.!  Which made me really excited because I LOVE that stuff!  So my ideas leaned towards simplicity and cuteness, even when the project began to sway in a direction that was, to my mind, fairly bland.  

The two main dudes were going to be very different.  You know: a tall goof and a short serious.  

The directors liked my little brown-haired elf girl from the line-up, and they thought she might make a good secretary for Santa.  So did a few drawings of her looking secretarial:

I still think she's cute.

I don't honestly completely remember what the deal was with these guys.  They are supposed to be mechanics or something.   Mechanic elves.  

This was my friend Erik's character styling suggestion:

Which I very much appreciated.  

Also, I had to draw reindeer.  As someone who has attempted animal drawing and found it to be excessively dull, this was a hard thing for me to tackle.  

When I found these in my drawing pile, I wasn't even sure that these drawings were MINE.  I had to look for telltale clues, like sloppy use of marker as underdrawing, to prove to myself that I ever drew this.  I've gone in such a different direction since then that these feel totally alien.  

The antlers were kinda fun.

Reindeers are like buff cows with big horns and skinny legs.  You guys, I drew so many reindeers.  This is really only the tip of the reindeer iceberg.  But that iceberg is kinda boring.  I got tired of scanning them.  

Long story short: I bailed out of Disney loooooooooong before Prep and Landing was finished (bout a year and half or so?).  I watched it, and I can still kinda see some how some of my design work had an effect on the final product, but I didn't get a credit or anything for it.  Near the end my heart was so totally NOT in being there that I was just happy to not ever have to draw another elf or reindeer ever again for the rest of my life.  And just not to have anyone tell me what, or how to draw at all.  

I managed to have some fun though.

The only thing I miss about working in a studio environment is having my buddies around me all day long.  It's pretty awesome when all your friends are super talented, and they like to come into your cube and interrupt your work flow by drawing you barfing into your own purse:

(I had very short hair back in the day!)

...or you as a child sitting on a giant dog and holding an avocado.  I don't get any caricature drawings anymore.  That makes me kinda sad.  I have a whole chunk of my life that is undocumented by other people's drawings of me!  I found LOTS of weirdy-weird drawings of me in that old Disney-drawing pile.  Those are probably the best things I saved.  

fairies

I am technically a grown up lady but some things I loved when I was just a sprout will just never become passe or uninteresting to me.  Like FAIRIES!

These designs are for a project I can't show you yet.  This is part of the bummer of working all the time: I'm always making stuff, but it's always for somebody else, so I can only show it off when they say it's okay.  Hm hmmn.  The point is, I get to make stuff all the time, and you'll see it eventually!

I could probably just keep drawing these forever.  They are marker on animation paper.  Markers are fun!

Got a lot of stuff coming up around the bend, guys.  BIG stuff.  Book stuff.  Stay tuned.  

CHEER!

I told you I had a lot of stuff to share, and I wasn't kidding!

About a year ago I was asked if I'd be interested in illustrating a series of books about a teenage girl.  That sounds kinda cool, right?  BUT, her primary interest in life, besides boys, and clothes, was cheerleading.  I know most of you don't know me personally, but perhaps you can tell by the overall impression of moi that you get from this blog,  that I could give a care about cheerleading, or school spirit, or anything remotely involved with liking high school at all.  I didn't enjoy high school one bit, myself, and I was about as far from a cheerleader as you could get.

It sounded like such an un-ME project that I almost said no.  But then I said yes.

And now those books exist, in the world, and my name is on them!

The first two books (in a series of five) are out now, and although they're chapter books they are riddled with illustrations.  I plucked a few of my favorites out to share with yous!

The illustrations are meant to be doodles and sketches by the narrator/star of the book series, a teenage girl named Maddy.  She wants to be a cheerleader SO BAD which I SO CAN'T relate to, but she is also an artist, and I CAN relate to doing silly drawings of things!

            Like wishing your nerdy best friend would dress cuter...

...or your best friend making faces at you...

...and getting dagger eyeballs from mean girls!

  It's a trip to see my own handwriting in a book.

 Ultimately, I'm really happy that I decided to jump into this book series.  The sketches are fun I make a point of forcing them to be interesting by inking them with a brush pen.  That way I can't noodle them forever (like in photoshop) and you get little spontaneous surprises sometimes.

  Plus they are supposed to be kind of wiggly and sketchy.  It's hard for me to avoid making them all clean and nice sometimes, tho...

So that's what I've been up to.  I wish I knew more tween-age girls, cuz I love to know what the intended audience thinks of the books.  

Now, back to work!

doodle explosion

I've been doodling a lot lately.  I'm in this Norman Rockwell tribute show in July, and I'm doing a couple paintings for it.  I'm using one of my favorite (and one of Rockwell's, too) subject matters:  teenagers.  They are pretty wonderful.  This is my very sloppy color sketch for one of said paintings.  

Here are some sketches that I coughed up in preparation for this piece.  I decided not to edit them or make them pretty, so, what you see is how they were drawn on the page. 

Doodles!

Some of these were done from photos.  It is hard to find good photos of teenagers.  The best way to observe them is in their natural habitat: walking home from school.  In photos they either look like children dressed as adults or they are trying very hard to appear attractive.  In person they can't hide all their appealing imperfections though.  

Most of these are not even whole ideas.  I just needed to warm up.  I tend to give up on a drawing half way through if I think it's not going where I want it to.  That's probably not a good habit.  But I keep doing it anyway.  

Even though this was drawn on a huge slice of 16 field animation paper, somehow my favorite drawings are squashed up against, and cut off by, the bottom of the page.  Mer.

This girl is a prototype of the one from the color sketch.  I think I  did a bazillion drawings of her before I found one that I really liked.  My thought process was something like "This girl will have cute short hair.  What kind of shirt would a short-haired girl wear?  She will wear a skirt because she's afraid people might think she's a boy if she doesn't, because she doesn't know how cute and girly she is.  She wears a lot of necklaces for the same reason..." etc. etc.  Yes it's fun to invent people.  

That head right in the the middle is my favorite thing that I've drawn in a long time.  I like that shoe too.  I considered giving her motorcycle boots, but I like cowboy boots better.  Plus it fits the 'Americana' theme of the show.  

I like that girl on the left a lot.  I wish I hadn't drawn that creepy man head so close to her.  It looks like he's trying to smell her hair or something.  Gross!

I hope you still like me now that you know I do lots of ugly and awkward drawings before I get to a good one.  

(Whoooooaaa blogger is all different now!  I like it.) 

Till next time, when I will have a lovely finished painting to show off!

twelve dancing princesses

My book Twelve Dancing Princesses is out this week, officially, in the world, for you to buy, and love and cherish!

So I thought I'd go back in time to when the book wasn't finished, to when it was barely just started, because it didn't just materialize out of thin air and Photoshop. Like most big projects, it developed in phases and rather slowly. There was lots of sketching and doodling and revising and things that didn't really look like anything that I'm surprised my editor could even understand!

Let's start at the beginning, when I chose what era I ought to place this far away kingdom in. I did NOT want to just do whatever-fantasy-far-far-away-princess-royalty-mashup. I love fashion history, and costumes, so I had to be specific. I liked the idea of doing an 18th century Mary Antoinette fanciful French style, but that has been done, and very beautifully, and one of my own favorite illustrators Kay Nielson, and I can't front Kay. I chose the 1830's-40's, because the kings were dapper, the ladies had big fantastic hoop dresses, and the shoes were appropriately similar to ballet slippers!

See?

I love how GIANT the dresses in that era were! Can you imagine wearing something that big? Everyday? Fitting through doorways in it? Going to the bathroom in it??

I did a few very rough and tumble character designs, for proportion and stuff. All twelve princesses are basically the same princess with different hair and dresses. To design and re-draw and remember all the puny details of twelve separate princesses sounded very not fun to me. It was challenging enough just fitting all twelve into each composition!

Since the story was already written and given the a-okay by my editor, I moved along to thumbnail sketches. They are very rough, and very small: I drew them on 1"x1.5" post-it notes. I did that so that I could doodle a composition and then if I didn't care for it immediately peel it away and draw another one. I went through an enormous stack of tiny post-it's in such a way. The compositions changed very little from what you see here.

This is the whole book in post-its!

I did all the final illustrations in Photoshop. I had to BUY Photoshop, because I had previously had only bootlegged versions of it (from being a student and to be fair, no student can afford that schnazz), and it kept crashing and asking me for serial numbers, and finally just wouldn't open at all. SOOOO expensive, but worth it in the end for a version that actually WORKS. It was a serious crisis for me for about 3 days, back when I was just beginning to work on the final art.

Yes there's like 100 layers, and they are all labeled appropriately. Virgo style.

What I take away from making this book is basically this: I really love making books. I'm beginning work on a new one...but that's for later!