I learned a lesson on this one: Don't spend a week drawing fox studies for foxes that you're going to eliminate. Composition (story) comes first!

Thanks for doing these prompts and contests, guys! They really are testing my ideas and skills, and slowly, I'm building a process that has some consistency, even though the "medium" varies.

And I really hand it to all my fellow artists who came up with such creative takes on this prompt!

I just changed out my entry for a version with my name on it. I hope that's ok. It's exactly the same artwork but I keep forgetting to include my name!

Some types like to be alone. Others, not so much...

Autumn reflection

The sole purpose of this piece was to see if I could finish something in a day, and to have fun. Yesterday I did have fun, and I thought I had finished it. But then it became evident that the legs were flipping (that is, you couldn't tell which one was in front and which in back). So today I spent most of the day redrawing it over and over until it worked, which was less fun. But I finished!

I'm very tempted to add a popsicle to that hand sticking out, but not today. Happy June!

Just trying to produce more finished work so I can evaluate it and have it evaluated online. This is a waiter I saw in a (coffee) bar in a tiny mountain hamlet near Aosta, Italy. He looked fierce and eccentric and I thought he might make a good character. I am always torn, though, between whether to exaggerate for comic effect or whether to keep things relatively realistic.

I didn't have much time to be on the forums while I was taking the Backgrounds course, but now I'll try to start posting and commenting again ️.

Because it rains every day in November where I live, and even a little patch of color brings hope.

Thanks for inventing Slowvember, Lee!

I spent the last week doing a brick and mortar workshop at which we assembled a lot of traditional elements into a digital collage. Our assigned story was The Musicians of Bremen, and we had to choose an environment, so I choose the rural US in the early 20th century, probably because I had to choose quickly and it was so far away from where I really was.

I spent most of the week developing sketches of the characters, and I did a super quick storyboard, during which I was amused to realize that the donkey thought he was going to play the lute and told the dog to play the kettle drums, but it will never work because the donkey only has hooves! In my story, the donkey became a she, and the instruments changed as well, but during the process I got an image in my mind of when things are settled, they finally get to play, and the donkey is found out.

This JPEG loaded really green for some reason. It doesn't look that green on either my Cintiq nor on my computer monitor, so I don't know what to do about it! But the original has much more muted, almost taupe-ish greens throughout, including the donkey's skin and the drum.

I'm supposed to go see relatives the end of the week, but I really wanted to get this piece to a decent point first. I'm tired of not finishing things! I'll probably get to my relatives' house and realize I didn't pack any shoes or something...

This morning I cleaned up all my January contest "tracks in the snow" files before putting everything on an external hard drive. Honestly, I was shocked at how many changes my contest piece went through, and how late some of them happened. And yet, I think some of those last minute changes really helped.

So I thought I would write down some notes and share them with you guys. What you get out of them--or not-- will obviously depend on your needs at the moment. I'm especially working on trying to get stylistically consistent and solidify my process so I can increase productivity and up the quality of concepts and technique as well. And I would be interested in hearing how your processes work as well, because that's not something we talk about that often.

First, a huge thank you!!! Because you guys really gave great critiques, I used pretty much all of your ideas, and they made the final drawing so much better! I just hope I can eventually internalize them.

Secondly, for whatever reason, I had nine different iterations, as in photoshop files, of this piece from the time I chose my thumbnail to posting on the contest thread. I find this is about average. It would be nice if I could get the number down, but generally either I get confused by all the options or the file just gets too unwieldy and I lack the confidence to eliminate previous versions. Hmm...

A couple of things stayed pretty much the same from start to finish, and I kept them because they were fresh looking. One of them was the drawing of the dog. A lot of the drawing on the trees stayed the same as well, though I changed their positions.

In summary, what I learned so far:

-The boards really help!!!
-Always, always get the compositional problems worked out first!!!
-Flipping the piece horizontally helps. I have a tendency to develop a directional slant, and while I never eliminated it completely, flipping did help.
-I'm going to try something else in this style
-Reference really does help, as does working out drawing problems just after the thumbnail stage
-Making animal people is fun! I still prefer drawing realistic-ish children, but I'm also starting to loosen up a bit by trying all these different things.
-Perspective study really helps just after the thumbnail stage
-You really can produce something personally satisfying from a prompt that doesn't inspire you at first glance

If you want to see the contest threads, I think you can find two or three of them under my profile.

What have you been learning in the contests and in your recent WIPs? I'd be interested to hear!

This drawing is, ironically considering it's Slowvember, an attempt to produce something quickly. It only took a few days' work off and on, which for me is unusually fast. It's based on a friend's son who likes to come home from preschool and dress up as Rapunzel. He's definitely a boy, but who doesn't like the idea of going around with swishy blonde hair now and then?

An illustrator friend posted this article and I thought it was interesting, so I'll share it here to see what you guys think:

https://qz.com/quartzy/1728767/why-editorial-illustrations-look-so-similar-these-days/

It talks about low pay, but we knew that already, didn't we?

What is more interesting to me is how economics and above all, technology, affect style. Here's a quote by artist Alex Eben Meyer:

“I think it is less about an artist working in a particular genre and more about having a strong point of view, ideas, style, and craft,” he explains. “For me personally, color (regardless of depth) and humor are some of my most important attributes.”

In short, he doesn't care about the style issue. To me, this is almost a throwback to a medieval sensibility in which the technique was a given and the variety came within a limited set of choices. The fun part about medieval illustrations is the particulars of what the figures are doing. And I do like the illustration of his that the article shows.

But I also think it's very different from a children's book sensibility, and very different from my own. I think I spend too much time wading through style issues. Of course, I'm a beginner and he's not.

Also, brings to mind how often Will, Jake and Lee remind us to come up with a good concept. That's especially important in editorial illustration.

Somewhere there should be a good mix of all the above that is also doable economically! What do you guys think? I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Incoming hands and feet!

Early in this assignment I got sidetracked with Baroque painting and sculpture, because I love the drama of Baroque hands and feet. Then I decided I wanted to study different ages and how children run. So my hands and feet aren't as whimsical as yours, @TessaW, and I suspect the assignment called for something freer and more creative than what I did, but I did have fun. Strangely, I could draw hands and feet all day!

P.S. Something I noticed is that when you draw contours of baby or small child feet, they really do have those lines that look like little rubber bands around their wrists and ankles, but if you draw them, they end up looking like Jabba the Hutt. So the hardest thing about the assignment was figuring out with how much wrinkle to leave and how much to erase so the babies didn't like like fat giant old men.

@Darian In the end I decided not to, because I want to do a sequence and I'm also working through the gesture class. I do like prompt events, though, so I may look for a smaller scale event in November. Thanks for asking!

Congratulations, @Darian! I remember this piece when you first posted it. It's really lovely!

So @TessaW, did you take 20 hands and 20 feet to be 20 pairs of each or 20 individual hands and feet? If it's 20 individual hands, I'm getting close!

First of all, congratulations on the job!

This is just a little background information to take into consideration:

My understanding of European publishers is that they offer very low advances in comparison to American ones. This is because the markets are smaller and they expect to sell fewer books. Therefore they hope to publish the books in other languages as well, in order to eventually make enough money. I am no expert, but that would make me think you want to be in on those other country rights, especially if your starting advance is low.

Yes, I listened to the whole thing yesterday! It's short, but very helpful. I may do the challenge with different content, to keep my accountable for a sequence that I want to do.

@NessIllustration It's really nice!

@davidhohn I understand it (i.e., this is just what I've heard people say casually), to go into business for yourself you have to do the bureaucracy to get a VAT number and then set yourself up with an accountant. This obligates you not only to pay an accountant, but also to make sizable social security payments even if you earn nothing. It's way more complicated than merely doing a schedule C, or even getting a business license in your home state and paying sales tax. I have done both in the US.

I have always planned to "go official" when I was ready to work professionally, but I never considered that work might start trickling in in amounts too small to make it worth it. The initial hurdle is high enough that you might operate at a loss, not to mention the time lost. This is in addition to the usual problem of starting artists not making much to begin with.

I honestly have no idea what all this does to contracts, but I would imagine that drawing up a contract makes you "official," and therefore subject to all the starting costs and bureaucracy. I should talk to an accountant.

Don't even get me started on doing two tax returns. I love Italy but I'm not fond of the bureaucracy!

Here's assignment 3, Weight and Wait. I am posting about half of these because there were so many. I had fun with the characterizations and trying to get the weight and gesture right, but this took way too long. I have got to do these faster. On to part 4!

@davidhohn and @Nyrryl-Cadiz Thank you! These are all very good points. In reality, I haven't worked professionally yet in illustration (only in portraiture, which is a whole different thing) and I don't have any idea how to establish a going rate (maybe that pricing book)? But I like the idea of doing it for a price that the client would consider low, and then licensing it. Also because I think the channel's concept has a lot of potential, and so I would be happy to promote it!

The reason I am assuming it's work for hire is that I am in Italy, where so much is done casually among friends. To do this with a contract, likely I would have to pay more to set myself up as a business (VAT tax number, etc.) than I would earn, which is a bummer, and that would put me under pressure to get more work immediately to make it worth it. I'm just now setting up my website and will hopefully be ready to go pro, or try to, by sometime next year. But I can inform myself here about the Italian side of things.

Anyway, thank you for the tips! At least I have some idea how it should be done now.