The blog for my new book is finally ready... after waiting for the appropriate holiday shopping weather to arrive. This book is 'The 12 Days of Christmas in Washington' and it's published by Sterling Books.  The writing has had excellent reviews and the artwork was fun to create.  

Washington state residents will recognize the many local landmarks right off. I greatly enjoyed writing and illustrating this colorful book. It's full of fun scenes in Pike Place Market, Mt. Rainier, Downtown Seattle, Puget Sound, Tacoma, Winthrop, Leavenworth and Spokane. (all my favorite places).

This book will no doubt be appearing beneath many an evergreen tree this Holiday season!  I'll be appearing myself at local bookstores and even at Costco to sign copies.

I had it in mind to create a new sample artwork illustration, but what to draw?  Elephants are always a good place to begin. So I decided to do a retro-1950's digital version of a zoo scene.

The pencil sketch was refined after about 5 major theme revisions.  Earlier versions had kids on a pirate ship, kids flying around over the zoo.  I found it interesting that I rejected some of the more imaginative ideas in favor of something closer to traditional.

Once I chose the theme, it only took a morning to assemble the elements and sketch it out on regular copy paper with a pencil. 

Then the scanning and digital rebuilding begins.  I filled in the color and made about a million changes to balance the colors.

I added a filter that I think worked very well, once again this was after trying half a dozen other filters.

Finally I decided after looking at it overnight that the background on the right was wrong.  So I recovered the original sketch I'd done about 7 years ago and worked that in.  It was perfect.  I added the colors and then put in some new patches of fence... and it was done. 

I think my favorite discovery with this piece was adding the sky and clouds. I used an older clouds file fr...

Creating the artwork and writing to 'The Twelve Days of Christmas in Washington' was a complicated process.  But it's finally all come together.  Last week I received the printer's proofs to the pages, which I had created using pencil lines scanned and photoshop for color.

It was unlike any book I'd done before, owing to the rich color depth and scanned textures which I assembled in photoshop.  I'd never done anything quite like it before.  My Mac Pro was indispensible in quickly opening half a dozen huge files at a time. I often wondered if the print outcome would work with the many new techniques I tried. At times making the paintings seemed almost symphonic, the colors obtained seemed so rich, deep and textured.

But I'm happy to report that the printed colors were exactly as I'd hoped. Even details the size of a dandruff speck were matched on paper. It is a joy to spend hours just soaking up the details of every digital brushstroke which previously had only existed only on the computer screen.  The writing was another challenge, since the tast was to match the diverse locations throughout the state of Washington and boil it all down into 150 word pages.  No easy task! 

But I t...

I've been having almost too much fun working on a new book for Sterling Publishing.  The title of the book is 'The 12 Days of Christmas in Washington', a very fun travel book. 
The joy of this new approach to artwork has been to explore the possibilities of merging real paint and digital paints.  My new Mac Pro has been key in this project, since the amount of computing required was beyond my previous machine.  Digital art is challenging... it makes an artist think in new ways.

The writing was challenging but fun.  I had to create a puzzle where all the elements fit into a storyline that takes the reader on a trip around Washington state.  It was much more challenging than I originally thought.

Doing the digital art was challenging as well.  As it felt like I was creating color depths that I'd never been able to capture with just acrylic paints.

Digital art can be novel, at least it is for me. There are things that which become possible which I've never been able to do with real paints.  Digital art is problem solving... it requires new learning curves and improvising new solutions.

The discovery of various paint brushes and pioneering a new technique has been wonderful.  I can con...

 This new book I am illustrating is a fun story set in New York's Central Park Zoo, written by Steve Metzger, published by Tiger Tales.

The real challenge to this project is trying to find a new synthesis of a retro 1950's style and a contemporary digital style.  

The art is based on pen brushed line, done on textured watercolor paper.  The colors are bright and bold... with patterns and textures done in photoshop.  I first looked carefully through the amazing artists of the 1950's, whose work seems very much akin to this current age.  

I was looking through magazines from the 1950's and found some amazing samples of Alice and Martin Provensen's illustration work from the 1950's.  It still looks very contemporary.  Maybe that's because 1950's design seems so similar to our own decade... or maybe it's just a timeless classic.  Of course they didn't get to use digital tools to embellish their amazing designs, but I guess their work will last the ages.

Some of the hallmarks of the graphic style might be thought to have iconic simplicity, overprinted color areas and simplified color backgrounds isolated by white space.  I tried to get some of that same look, along with an added cont...