Halloween 2005

Click on this happy skull from my front yard if you'd like to see more pictures from Halloween. I finally got around to posting them!

Illustration Friday: Broken

The other day I was offered a job to do a poster about Ben Franklin, so this is the first thing that came to mind for this week's IF topic. That, and I've been building little dudes like this in Flash for the last few days. So there ya go.

The Lair

Since I haven't done a piece for this year's Gallery of Terror, I'm using my house as this year's entry. I had a bit too much fun decorating for this year's big Halloween Soiree...

I have more pictures coming, but a sneak peak:

Illustration Friday: COLD

The Cognomen of Crane

Plans have begun in earnest for this year's Halloween extravaganza. The ghastly festivities are planned for Oct 22, and I only hope I can have everything ready in time! I was trying to think where I could find some great hi-res victorian portraits to print and frame (going with the Victorian Haunted Mansion theme this year), when I remembered years ago doing a ton of research at the Library of Congress (online). Great, GREAT resource for reference if any of y'all need it! And the best thing, uncompressed archival TIFFS for download. Takes a bit of effort to search around in there, but well worth it.

The image above is of none other than Ichabod Crane...

OK, so not THE Ichabod Crane. This guy was a Colonel, 1st Artillery, US Army, died 1857. You think his parents were Washington Irving fans? Cool picture nonetheless...

Cow Eyes

Still working on those icons, amongst other things... One of the cool things about this project is I can paint any icon in any style I want, so I've been having fun experimenting. This is my I-must-have-looked-at-too-many-of-those-Margaret-Keane-paintings icon. I actually kinda like it... oooo, so soft and fuzzy.... well, truth is I was just happy not to paint any ears.

Avast Ye Scurvy Landlubbers!

Click on thumbnail for larger image

Ahoy me Brethren of the Coast! Just in case you forgot, a friendly reminder that International Talk Like A Pirate Day is just twelve days away on September 19! Arrrrrrrr....

"But I don't know me some Pirate Talk," ye say. Well, here's a good place ta start me bucko:
Pirate Dictionary
Or ye can try me translated Blog:
Sweet Bonny Blog O' The Baroness

A wee note on the sketch - 'twas some concept art done years ago for a project that never happened. No quarter given. Arrrrr.... curse those bilge-sulking blaggards!

Fair winds me hearties!
~Red Mary

Icons - part two

One of the projects I've been working on lately has been a big ol' pile of icons. Meaning: Lots and Lots. More literally: A gajillion.

It's been fun, I'm getting some good practice doing things start to finish digitally, since no time to bother with sketching on paper and scanning and all that nonsense.

Quick process: rough sketch on one layer, once that's kinda worked out, I drop the opacity pretty low, then on another layer do a rough tracing. Under that sorta nice line drawing, I block in colors, some quick shading. I might do a little coloring to the line layer, and then I merge it all. Then I clean it up and add details, working on it more like I used to paint with acrylics. Haven't been using any fancy brushes or anything, just the defualt psd ones at varying levels of size and opacity. I did have to reset my Wacom tablet to a firmer pen tip setting though, to get a little more control over thick and thins.

The cats and girl probably took me about an hour and a half each start to finish (at 600x600 dpi) which is still a bit too long. (Duck I think was under an hour.) I'm spending a bit too much time fussing with the details. I'm hoping to get these things down to a half hour/45 minutes max. This week I'm supposedly going to get a nice demo on working in Painter, so we'll see how that goes. Kinda excited about it.

Icons - part one

Who knew when I took a break from working Saturday to go junkin' with my junkin' pal Bill, that I would discover I could absolutely not live another day without a 19th century Russian Orthodox Icon. Well. It happened.

I don't know much about it, just that it is called a Mary Mother of God of Iver, the region it's from in the former Republic of Georgia. The dark box around it is called a Kiot, which was used to hold the icons when the priests would carry them around.

Deciding to make an orthodox day of it, on the way out of town, I took Bill to see the "Virgin of Guadalupe" tree. Sorry to report that we could not see the Virgin Mary in the tree knot. Didn't look like much of anything to me. It must have changed over the years, cause it currently looks nothing like this picture.

Anyway, a fine day had. My icon now happily hangs in my studio next to a Mexican marionette bought across the alley from the Alamo.

Super Important Announcement

My pirate name is:

Red Mary Bonney

Get your own pirate name from fidius.org.

Muggins

Here's a fun little project I did awhile ago. I had to sign non-disclosures while working on it, but since it's on the web, figure it's ok to talk about now. American Greetings asked me to design some avatars, I guess they are used for MSN Messenger. I'm not really sure of the details. And since I have a Mac, I can't actually use them, but you can try them out here at this link:

Blue Mountain Muggins

It was a fun job. I built all the pieces in Macromedia Flash, sort of like a flip book. I delivered everything grayscale and the fabulous folks at American Greetings did the backgrounds, animations and colors (since you can change the colors of most things.)

Where the term Muggin comes from - no idea.

Envy

cheating again this week - this is a bit old... hopefully next week i can start doing some new work for Illo Fri.

Why this for Envy? I have three books due this week, plus sketches for two more due monday which equals no sleep for me. I miss my feather bed!

-maryn



illustrationfriday.com

Harry & Ginny

A rare moment of doing something for fun! I did this a couple weeks ago - a little birthday gift for a Harry Potter fan. I think this was one of the first times I did the linework right in Photoshop. I usually scan a pencil drawing, but I wanted to try a little experiment. Took a bit longer than if I'd done it with pen and paper, but it was a nice way to get clean, slick lines. I think I'll do all the linework this way on my next book.

(click on thumbnail for larger image)

-maryn

Aquatic

I can't believe I haven't posted since February. Uh... oops. So I figured for the sake of getting back into the swing of posting, I'm cheating a bit, and using something I'd done a while ago for this week's Illustration Friday. Probably could fit the theme a bit better, but at least it's a little fishy!

-maryn



illustrationfriday.com

Nancy... redux

Oh, I forgot about this. Here's a little more Nancy. After I did that Nancy Experiment, I found out I was supposed to be drawing Nancy as a pre-teen. Oops. Here's one of the color comps for that - done with the same process as the other Nancy illo. Needless to say, didn't get the gig. Ah well!

The Nancy Experiment

I had a rough sketch of Nancy Drew, and decided to finish it off by experimenting with the same technique I tried with the rooster illustration . I've decided I like the method, but I'm not too happy with the way Nancy herself turned out. There's something that bugs me about her face especially. Anyway, I thought it'd be interesting to show the different steps...

click on thumbnails for larger image

This is the first sketch - done quickly with good ol' pencil and paper. Poor Nancy looks a bit crazed.

I scanned the sketch, and started making adjustments in photoshop. I have a tendancy to draw eyes too big, so first thing was to shrink the eyes. Once I was reasonably happy with the revisions, I printed this out.

Using a lightbox, I redrew Miss Nancy, and spent a while doing lots o' shading. I used a blue colorerase pencil, mostly because I had one sitting around (scanned grayscale...). Her face lost the original expression, but I didn't feel like trying to fix it.

After scanning the finished drawing into photoshop (and moving her left arm a bit), I made the lines into a channel, filled it, and made it the top layer. I made lots of layers underneath - one for hair, one for skin, one for her shirt, etc. and then did a little bit of shading under the lines.

The finish... After some basic shading under the lines, I colored the lines a few shades darker than what was underneath. Then on a layer above the line drawing, I did lots of touch-ups and highlights all over the place. I experimented a little with custom brushes, but I mostly used the Spatter brushes in the default palette. To finish it off, I put a texture of a piece of scanned velvety paper over the top of the whole thing.

So there 'tis. Time for some sleuthin'!
-maryn

Keane Eyes

Had an exciting morning "junking" about some of the more uh... interesting... parts of Salt Lake City. We found lots of eBay potential - but I found the treasure of the day: stacks and stacks of (Walter) Margaret Keane prints. There's just something creepy yet compelling (in a black velvet painting sort of way) about them, that I just had to have one. For a hefty 4 bucks, I'm now the proud owner of a print of Big-Eyed Carolers. Some look as if yowling in pain, the others just sad, despondent with the knowledge that Santa has forgotten them yet another year.

So if you've never had the pleasure of experiencing the phenomenon of "Waifs," "Keanes," or "Sad Eyes," - here ya go. Enjoy!
Keane Eyes Gallery

Year of the Rooster

thanks to otis for telling me about illustration friday.com - here's my first foray

-maryn



illustrationfriday.com