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Childrens Illustration Sketch

So I've been thinking a lot about illustrating for children lately. As a father of two wonderful kids under seven years old, I read a lot of children's picture books. I think it's a lifetime goal of most illustrators to do a children's book at some point in their career. As I dreamed about what it would take to make that happen for myself, I realized that I didn't have any work currently in my portfolio that demonstrated an ability to illustrate for kids. So while a lot of people see my work and say "you should do children's books", I don't think I have anything that would appeal to an art director looking to find a match for a children's author. I think they'd want to see an ability to illustrate children and animals, and consistently illustrate characters across multiple pieces. So I decided to do a series of illustrations for the four seasons, with the same boy, girl, and dog in each.

In honor of the 100+ degree temperatures we've been having over the last couple of weeks, here is my sketch for "Winter":

Winter sketch

I'm pretty happy with it. For the snow being kicked up around the sled, I was going for a mashup between classic hot rod painted flames and traditional Japanese woodblock-print styled water. It's coming off a bit harsh in the sketch but I already have a newly-created fluffy soft texture made up for the snow that I know will soften the effect and hopefully provide an interesting contrast.

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New Finished Illustration: Optimism in an Uncertain Economy

I Finished the new illustration and I'm really happy with it. My biggest challenge was balancing the layers of cloud textures, cloud line work, etc. in the building reflections. In the end I had to sacrifice the textural work and reduce the opacity of the cloud line work to get it to read as reflections on mirrored glass. What do you think, did I hit the right balance?

Optimism small
(Click to enlarge)

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Optimism sketch

Working on a new stock image on the theme of optimism in an uncertain economy. I've had this image of a mirrored-glass building reflecting clearing skies amidst storm clouds in my head for a while now. I started sketching on paper before inking it in Illustrator, it's going to take the final color and shading to make the "clearing sky" building stand out. Here is the sketch and the Illustrator linework version:

Optimism sketch         Optimism ink

(Click either image to enlarge)

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Detail/ Sons of Anarchy final

Finished the Sons of Anarchy piece. Overall I'm happy with it. As a technical exercise I succeeded in pushing the level of detail too far- but this has helped me immensely in finding the point at which things break down within my style and more is simply more. I hope to incorporate some of the lessons I've learned here in the direction I take moving forward.

Samcro final
(Click to enlarge)

I included some detail images, these still are less than half the resolution of the original:


Samcro detail 1

Samcro detail 2

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