Sketch of crow. Ink pen and watercolor. I think I need a new scanner to scan anything that’s not black and white. This one is making my browns look purple and neon-ish. This was the best I could do to adjust the color in Photoshop to look like the original.

Been very busy with work over the last couple of months (at least I think it’s been a couple of months, I’ve sorta lost track of time). Am STILL really busy, which is a good thing all things considered. Am currently working on something for Oxford University Press, as well as several other things.

Anyways, here’s the new stuff that’s been added to the site:

Eating Well – Nourish

For Eating Well magazine, in the new ink brush style. Very happy with it. It’s about the joy of growing and eating your own food. I love food. Even though I don’t eat all that much.

Kayak – Summer in Canada spread

For Kayak’s summer issue featuring Monty Moose.

Know Magazine – Baked Alaska

For Know science magazine for kids. About the discovery of Baked Alaska. More food, strangely.

Animals of the Chinese zodiac. Click the pic for a much larger (and nicer) view.

Random sketches of people around Kensington market. Lots of great people to draw, only wish they’d stop more often instead of just walking by in like 5 seconds.

Just a couple of sketches done yesterday, ink brush pen over pencil. My back is hurting – boo.

One of my rare traditional media pieces, done in color inks, india ink, color pencil and acrylic. You can see the enlarged sketch behind, which was transferred with transfer paper to 18×24 watercolor paper. The original sketch was in my sketchbook.

The finished ‘traditional’ artwork.

With a bit of Photoshop tweaking to the colors.

This started as a sketch for a competition a website was running that involves movie monsters. Unfortunately I didn’t finish it in time for the deadline due to work. Now that I’ve got a bit more time, I decided to finish it up. Ink brush pen with digital colors.

pencil sketch for illustration

So like everything else that gets finished, The Hunted started out as a pencil sketch. Since this was a test, I sketched it straight onto my Stonehenge paper. Which is a bit silly because it’s nice expensive paper that, like all nice expensive papers, is prone to lose some of its niceness due to erasing, which is pretty much inevitable if you’re not doing a prep sketch.

But since I’m a bonehead – oh well. I did the sketch in blue pencil and then went over it with a HB. At first I was trying to make the lines look good, to see how the pencil would react with the paper. Ultimately I knew I was going to ink over it anyway so it really didn’t matter, and you can see that halfway through I decided to just rough out the outline (towards the bottom). Scanned it in before I inked it.

color rough

Here’s the color rough. It was was my own reference so I just did a really messy job with throwing in the colors I wanted to use. The paper texture was also dropped in to see how it would react with the colors. It did a really good job. I saved a small version of the file so I could easily pick the colors for reuse later.

inking the artwork

Here is the inking in progress. I used a brush pen, as well as india ink with several brushes, and a dip pen. I probably could have done it all in brush, but again I was testing how the paper reacted with the various things. It did too good a job (to me) of soaking up the liquid from my brush pen, but it had a nice bite for the india ink, so I’ll probably use a brush next time with this paper. The dip pen didn’t do so great, maybe I need a more fluid ink or something, but it just wasn’t flowing right.

final illustration

After the inks were done it was back to the scanner. Scanned in the inks at 600dpi, reduced the file to 400dpi and added the colors and textures. I did another pinkish version (see previous post) but this is really closer to what I wanted to achieve, so I guess I’ll settle with this as the final version.

Hope it was a fun read!

The Hunted. Pen, india ink, brushes, Photoshop, custom digital brushes, some scanned paper, Stonehenge paper, and a few backaches. Not sure which I prefer. Top is a variant, bottom is the original.

Yes, I do find the people in the Sears catalog to be scary. Straight up brush pen in my smaller sketchbook.