As I close in upon completing my portfolio of spot illustrations, I have been focusing exclusively on humans due to the fact that my portfolio is still what some might call ‘animal heavy’. I love animals and love drawing and coloring them, but I assume that art directors will want to see that I can draw and paint a variety of humans as well. My wife and I spent a Saturday lunch a few weeks ago brain-storming a number of human illustration ideas over delicious plates of Chinese food, and one of her most inspired ideas was, “What about a little girl dancing to the tune of a ballerina music box? Maybe she’s trying to mimic the pose.” I could immediately see that image in my head, and it was easily the best suggestion that either of us came up with during that lunch. Here is my pencil sketch:
I spent a long time revising this drawing. It’s very easy for me (and most artists, I think) to get so bogged down in the details of images that I lose sight of the overall image. I would spend a lot of time just focusing on the positions of the fingers on her hand, only to realize when I looked at the whole image that she now looked like she had two claws! Once I’d found a decent balance between simplicity and detail, I played around with the colors in photoshop. Here is the colored sketch that I worked from:
When I set to inking this image, I was very careful to keep my lines light. I knew that this was a delicate image, and even one sort of heavy ink line could ruin that sense of delicateness. I’m pretty happy with how this came out.
Tag: dancer
Dancing flamingo
A couple of years ago I was asked about contributing some flamingo background dancers to the cover of a CD. I quickly found some reference for flamingos online, and drew up this wildly dancing, 20’s era flapper-looking, flamingo back-up dancer. I inked the drawing with my Pentel Pocket Brush Pen (one of my favorite art tools of all time) and then converted the inked lines to vectors in Adobe Illustrator. Here is what my inked, unconverted lines looked like:
I then added colors in Illustrator and posted it to facebook. Here is the colored, vector art image:
Ultimately the musician decided to go in a different direction, but I got a lot of positive facebook comments for it. Recently I was looking for older work that might be fun to redo as watercolors, and this image came up. I like my watercolored version more than the vector art version because the lines are more delicate and don’t overpower the colors as much as some of the lines do in the vector art version. I also changed the pearl necklace to blue rather than pink, and I think that makes for a nice break in the colors.
That’s all for today. Thanks for stopping by!