Inktober 2018 "splash" off

Splash!

Monday starts the Inktober challenge 2018 and I will participate with my own prompt list. The topic is toddler routines and I am hoping to create interesting colour-in pages for toddlers with pictures of activities they can identify with and that may help their grown ups to introduce as routine cards.

The tools I will be using are a blue mechanical pencil and a graphite pencil for sketches, fine liners by Staedler and Rotring for the final pictures, and then pen and Rohrers ink for maybe some fancy stuff or fonts.

The Bristol heavy paper by Canson is my absolute favourite for fine liner work. The surface is super silky on touch and the white is absolute. The ink doesn't spread and lines remain crispy sharp. It seems so effortless to slide the liner on the paper and the dried ink looks better than what a printer can press into paper... I am jut in love with it.

Happy inking everyone!

What is INKtober?

Keywords you need to know:

Jake Parker, illustrator and cartoonist, and a business genius. He is dedicated, diligent, and the most disciplined artist I have seen in online media.

Inktober - an ink painting a day, means to get into a habit of painting each day. This improves skills through daily training and sets your mindset into taking art as something that you can work on and not something just for talented people.
See more on: https://inktober.com/

What is staging in the process of creating a children's book?

Work

Book "Africa" is getting into the next step: staging! I create a bunch of test thumbnails drawing different perspective and/or different motion.

Staging is the process where you create the stage for a scene: where is the camera, what  perspective, who is going to be in the scene, where are they going to stand, what is the dynamic going to be?

For each spread (double page) I do about 7-8 and sometimes more. I try to be as creative as possible but also try to pay attention to my initial vision I had when I read the script for the first time. This first picture is an echo of all my experience with other books and movies, which means that probably a lot of people will have similar pictures in their head when reading the text, assuming we are exposed to the same culture. I feel it is good to present people with something familiar, so they can read the message quickly. But it is really important to go further than that first echo, in order to create something new. What I wouldn't want is to draw just copies of copies of memories (ref. Fight Club)

Private
I got some cheap brush pen markers to treat myself and play around with scripting and pattern design. I do feel it might have been one of those impulsive purchases ... ah well, why not. It is for fun and I will enjoy it.

It is meditative and helps me focus on the task ahead. (So it is kind of work related :-P) The tips are a bit fussy, but I also didn't want to spend a lot of money, so it will do just fine. I am enjoying to exercise my wrist and fingers and getting just the right pressure on the tip to paint smooth transitions between thick and thin lines. These are the type of patterns I do:

References
To learn what I learned about staging watch this great video by Marco Bucci!

Strong tint water colour and lighting exercise

work
I finished book JO (JO is a working alias), a story about a family that is just the mum and son, in August. The proofs have been send back to me for a check and everything looked fabulous. Now we just have to wait for the printing production. I am sitting on hot charcoal and can't wait to share the pictures, once the book is published.

The next book project is about the African culture. I did a handful messy paintings as a warm up training and posted them here below.

There is a big difference to my usual art. My usual pictures are quite pale, which was alright for Caucasian babies. To be honest I was always a bit worried to ruin the picture with a wrong placed shadow so I would work with very light washes. But that just wouldn't work for dark skinned babies. I had to soak my brush in paint and just go for it. And if you are not confident enough, they say "fake it till you make it!" And that is what I played by. The result is quite alright.

exercise
Time to get that value right! I have been watching these videos by top artists explaining value, and shade, ambient light, direct light, core shadows, cast shadows.... It's a whole library of words, and I am slowly getting the grips of a hand full of them.

In my work I just started to separate the way I deal with form shadow v.s. cast shadow. The first is to bring the 3-D feeling of the object to life, and the latter is to bring that object into context with the surrounding, where an other object throws a shadow on to it, or itself is throwing a shadow on other things. The little picture below shows the difference.

These shadows are influenced by the light around them of course, so I always have to ask where is the light source and what parts of the object does it hit?

It involves a lot of thinking at the beginning, but I am sure it will become natural soon.

postmortem INKtober 2017

2017

For the last years INKtober I set myself a goal to spontaneously paint whatever, as long as it fits in a 2cm by 2cm box. It didn't even had to be the same topic or style, and could be characters, objects or just patterns. The year before I had a strict list what to paint everyday, and it involved a lot of research for each picture. You can read about it in this blog (see link below).

So last year, it went well to start with, but after about two weeks it became more difficult to come up with something, as I didn't had an aim. Soon house work and baby took over and pictures were pushed to the next day, and promises to finish two in a day if I missed the day started degrading the morality of continuing.

However, it wasn't a waste at all. Just another trial to complete this challenge. You can clearly see what my favorite topic was :-) My little daughter and all her adventures. And this brings me to make this years topic. It's going to be all about toddler and their daily business.

What I will do different compared to the two years before is, that I will make a list, but of things I can probably paint in half n hour without having to research a lot. I will have an overall topic and I have a plan on publishing it either as cards or color-in pages.

What is INKtober?

Keywords you need to know:

Jake Parker, illustrator and cartoonist, and a business genius. He is dedicated, diligent, and the most disciplined artist I have seen in online media
An ink painting a day, means to get into a habit of painting each day. This improves skills through daily training and set your mindset into taking art as something that you can work on and not something just for talented people.
See more on: https://inktober.com/

How it went for me in INKtober 2016

I was determined to complete at least half the list, but I delivered only one weeks worth of pictures over a period of two weeks. The problem was ... read more here