Illustration Friday: SWIM

I learned this song when I was at Girl Scout day camp when I was 8 years old and I always loved this song since then. I love to swim and this song is a fun song to sing because you just keep on singing it, it doesn't really end until you want it to or someone asks you to end it. Swimming is like that for me too, I can just keep on swimming and swimming until I want to stop or someone asks me to.

PLAY POSTER: A Crown of Ivy

It's that time of year again where I design a poster for my husband's student's play performance. Usually, I am given a photo of some of the cast to use on the poster, but this time, the photographer wasn't available. So I had the option of illustrating the poster. It could've been an all type poster but the subject matter of the play (which my husband wrote especially for his 6th grade students) screamed for a more Victorian look. I only had the weekend in which to do it and it's been ages since I've drawn in this way, so I was a little nervous. So I spread some books with art by Arthur Rackham, Tony diTerlizzi and Brian and Wendy Froud on the table for inspiration and got to work. I didn't include a background to keep it simple (and also because I just didn't have the time.) The boy and the fairy are pencil drawings that I scanned, the color was done in Photoshop and the background is a pattern that I keep around for projects like this.

Here's the pencil drawing:

iPad Drawings: Mermaids

I made these drawings recently on my iPad with a Pogo sketch stylus pro and the Brushes app. It was even better than I had expected. I could zoom out for the tiny thumbnail I like to make before sketching something. I then zoomed in, made a new layer and made a tighter sketch over it. And then more layers for more embellishments. It makes sketching in color much more portable and accessible for me. I still like  working by hand with tangible things like ink, paper and watercolor better but lack of space to do that at this time makes this a great alternative.

As for the mermaid subject matter...I really love swimming and drawing mermaids is much more interesting than drawing swimmers.

TWELFTH NIGHT POSTER

I just designed this poster for my husband's middle school production of Twelfth Night. I literally did it almost overnight and stayed up way too late. It was quite fun, looking up psychedelic posters, listening to psychedelic music and then hand manipulating the fonts and using colors I like.

Now why is that significant? I've been working for the past year freelance art directing a mass market series of children's books that uses the same font, the same colors and the same look. The poster was anything but that. The art direction has been more time-consuming than I had anticipated, causing my disappearance from the blogosphere. The series is still ongoing and I'm still art directing it, but I'm going to set myself the goal of one blog post per month to give my creative juices an outlet.