howNowCow two

Final art, inked & colored

notNowCow

Concept sketch for a client project, a magazine article about microgardening, a practice in which garden seeds are sown and tended to the sprout stage and then harvested. (Think alfalfa sprouts but anything we can plant qualifies as a candidate.) I ruminated quite a while on this, wandering between concepts, before zeroing in on the author’s comment about her first attempt yielding “a miniature pasture of bright green stems that was just begging for a tiny cow and a toy tractor.” Once I got there, the cow’s response to an impending milking by giant fingers would NOT leave my head.

squeakedIn

Each piece of work begins with a pencil stage. I work and re-work (as needed) the idea, the story board, the character(s). I form notions in my head about how I’ll ink the final art. I then scan the pencil drawing with a grayscale setting at 300ppi and print the drawing at a comfy size for inking.

To ink, I overlay the pencil drawing with a sheet of pure rag marker paper and draw with black ink from a brush that has a self-contained reservoir. This is where I work on nuance of line and begin the shading process. In the past, I’ve often used #s 3 and 4 sable brushes dipped into an ink bottle and I may go back to that. I often augment the brush work with pens. And yes, as a young’un, I actually dipped metal nib ruling pens into an ink bottle.

Once the ink drawing is dry, I scan it in black/white mode at 600ppi. I then make a layered .psd file, in which I may do some minor cleanup of the line art. I switch to grayscale mode and use the wand tool to remove the white background from the line art layer. Color is added mostly using the brush tool and a typical art piece will have four to eight layers of color to allow for quick edits, if needed.

badKitty

MondoBeat authors send me their draft copy so I can understand the topical theme and begin concepting an art theme that ties it all together. Sometimes that’s a quick take — such as the Thought Leadership theme that led to drawings of chess pieces a few issues ago; other times, it’s more of a developing process that revolves around a promising visual path that just lands in my head.

The latter was the case in this instance — Webinars — which is intangible for anything other than boring visual associations of talking heads. But suppose the heads belong to another species?

I had just finished illustrating a book on controlling pests in the food industry, for which I had drawn mice, and had just finished reading the first volume of Mouse Guard, a fascinating and beautifully drawn graphic novel. How would a mouse give a webinar? And about what? The notion started to click when I shrunk the concept of a webinar down to mouse size and suddenly, I saw an iPhone as the delivery vehicle, which quickly led to “trapApp” as the topic. But how to broadcast? A video camera? . . . No . . . a web cam, of course. Shrink everything.

Next came the Do’s and Don’ts. In my head, I worked through images of a mouse pointing at a list until I focused on the mouse pointing its finger, and thought of it wagging its finger to say “Don’t, don’t” to, uh . . . well, a cat, of course.

Then, the topic of branding, often the toughest. In this case, the author took branding into the realm of how you expand your webinar brand into other social media, and the visual came rather quickly. A mouse logging into, uh, MouseBook? Well, no, SqueakedIn!

OK, done. Tomorrow, I’ll look at artwork technique.

trapApp

Final art for piece titled “trapApp.” This is a series of three drawings for a marketing e-newsletter which typically publishes three articles related to a particular theme — in this case, Webinars. In each issue, the first article will be an overview with advice, examples of best practices, and learning resources; the second article will be a do’s and don’ts compilation; and the third will relate to branding and further how-to advice.

Hence, “trapApp” is for article one, “badKitty” (see earlier posted pencil) is for article two, and “squeakedIn” (see yesterday’s posted pencil sketch) is for article three. Visit the MondoBeat blog to read the articles or subscribe to the e-newsletter.

Tomorrow, I’ll post final art for “badKitty” and discuss the creative process.