Can't believe I haven't posted for over a month. Ooops. Been doing lots of miscellaneous things lately, both at the day job (I work at a software development company) and with the freelance. I thought I'd show what we're working on at the moment at the ol' job. We're illustrating these little readers called Decodables and are budgeted to get three pages done a day. I went a little over on this book - I was averaging about 3 to 3 1/2 hours a page. (I have horribly unsteady hands when trying to draw clean black lines, so I'm a little slow at it.)
Everything is done in Photoshop. Since I knew I wanted some items to have different line colors, those lines are each on different layers - that way I can just turn the Preserve Transparency on, and fill the lines, faster than painting them. The solid filled-in colors are on separate layers, with just a tiny amount of shading here and there. One of the benefits of those clean black lines, I can use the magic wand tool to select an area, and then up in the Select menu, choose Modify > Expand... and expand the fill area a few pixels, then on a lower layer hit Alt + Delete to fill in my color with hardly any touch-up.
It's fun to whip out these little books, but I wish we had just a *little* bit more time to spend on them!
5 comments:
Hello Maryn, just thought about leaving you a quick note, I love your work and I find it very inspirational, it's great to come across a person who enjoys her work (and excels at it) as much as you do. I'm kind of an artist caught up in a programmer outfit (but just temporary :))
have a great day!
-Hector
Looks like you're having fun at Waterford South, amazing stuff as usual. The younger girls legs appear to be crossed, though, like both legs are coming out of the same pant leg. I assume she's wearing shorts? Just my initial reaction. Otherwise the gesture reads perfectly. All the best to Jim, Don, Chris & co.
El Geco
Hey thanks fellas
heh - so i noticed those little leg problems as I was posting. oh well. Jim's already giving me a hard time for making these too fancy. Gotta go even faster, which probably means even more backwards legs and weird proportions! ;-) "Waterford South" I like that. Guy likes to call it "New Waterford" but I think I like yours better. Was horribly embarassed in a meeting the other day when I referred to ourselves as Lucas Learning. It's been uh... what... 4 years since I worked there? Ooops.
First, nice to see you on your blog again. Second, thanks for talking about your process...I really appreciate learning technique! Third, in reference to having to put out three pages a day...do you think that is compromising the finished product? I understand deadlines, but, why push the art?
Hi Ellen,
So to answer point 3 - sure, having to pump out three pages a day is going to affect what you can create. I'd love to spend a couple days on each page, but that's not going to happen. It's really more of a cost analysis - the purpose of these books doesn't require fabulous art, we just have to do the best we can with the tight deadline. We do other books that are meant to be more showpieces, and we get 3 days PER page for those, so it's all based on intent and use I guess.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by Why push the art? I just look at the deadline as another of the parameters when designing the illustration. I have x amount of time, what can I do that will look decent in that time frame. I don't think that's compromising the art - that's just part of the planning/designing process, at least to me. Hope that made sense...
-Maryn
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