Scuffy in 3X3 Picture Book Annual.

Last week I received the great news that pictures from  my personal project "Scuffy- A Scarecrow's Tale" have been accepted into the 3X3 illustration Annual. I've been trying to get the story published ever since I started the book as part of my MFA project back in 2009.

Finally, a picture book annual that had an unpublished category has come along and I am gratified to finally see at least part of the book in print. There was a snag in the process when I read in the submission guidelines that even unpublished entries needed to be submitted as "published" spreads and include the "cover".

I enlisted the help of friend and fellow artist Val Paul Taylor to give my spread mock ups and cover a nice type treatment. I am super excited with the wonderful type treatment he came up with for the "book". Scuffy is currently being shop by my literary agent, so hopefully I will actually get to finish the book at some point. Fingers crossed!

Octopus Battle

Octopus Battle- acrylic/mixed media by Greg Newbold.

In this scene from Stormalong, our intrepid hero Stormy dukes it out with a giant octopus in a liquid battleground. The ship's anchor was being dragged deeper and the ship along with it. Of course Stormy dives deep, wins the the wrestling match by tying the octopus' legs in knots and makes it safely back to the surface. I posted a couple of other pieces from this series earlier and you can see them at the links below.

Baby Stormalong discovered on the beach
Stormalong's carved memorial 
Stormalong title page illustration

Baby Stormalong

This is part of the Stormalong series I did a couple of years back that I described in my last post. The future folk tale hero started life out large and only got bigger. This one depicts the moment when the villagers find baby Stormy on the beach. I am just not sure where you get diapers for a baby that big.

Stormalong background info on Wikipedia

Tribute to Stormalong

I was updating some portfolios last weekend and found a series of paintings I did a couple of years back for the American Fable Stormalong. The story of Alfred Bulltop Stormalong who begins life as a larger than life abandoned baby who is raised by an entire harbor town. He was hauled back to town in a wheelbarrow and continued to grow until he was as large as a whale. Stormy then goes on to have all sorts of adventures as a sailor on the high seas. In the end, a statue is erected in the town square
as a tribute to his legacy. I have enjoyed American Tall Tales since I first heard the Paul Bunyan legend, but I was not as familiar with this one. I did a total of nine images for this story that was included in a reading anthology textbook for elementary aged students. I'll post some of the others I have not posted before later this week.

Suspend Disbelief

Any book or movie that falls into the fantasy genre demands that you suspend disbelief and just sit back and enjoy the story. I think it would also be pretty cool to be able to suspend magical flames in my hand and then send them flying like the character in this book.The painting above is from a series of covers I did for the Chestomanci Series by Diana Wynne Jones.

The book is called The Lives of Christopher Chant and you can still get it, though the series of covers I did has been phased out and the books are now packaged with different covers. It's a bummer that most books that hang around for any length of time get the face lift treatment, but such is life. It was fun to do so many covers for the same author and series though. I think I did seven or eight Wynne Jones covers over a period of a couple of years.

Puzzled

Digging through the archives a few weeks back, I found this cover I did for a murder mystery set in the southwest. It was titled Death of the River Master by Allana Martin and was published by St. Martin's Press. The story conflict revolved around water rights between neighboring towns on either side of the U.S-Mexican border. Murder and conspiracy ensue. As I recall, I quite enjoyed the story. I went for a metaphorical solution involving the desert mud and a couple of bullets forming a skull. I especially like how the dry riverbed mud puzzled all together. It made the textures and patterns a lot of fun to paint. I still really like this one. 

Swamp Sunset

Swamp Sunset by Greg Newbold- 8" x 16" acrylic

I just got an email today from a mother telling me how much her children loved Spring Song, the book that includes this image. It's really nice to hear from readers and parents of readers since, for me at least, I don't often get that kind of feedback. In part it read:

My children and I enjoyed Spring Song today and I wanted you to know how much we enjoyed your illustrations.  I've seen your work before and should have recognized it...Thank you for sharing such lovely work.

This reaction is one of the main reasons why I enjoy making a book so much. In recent weeks, I have pulled out and revised some manuscripts that I have written and am gearing up to get another book in the pipeline. Finding a publisher is the hard part, so wish me luck.

Moonlight Serenade- 8" x 16" , acrylic

Here's the companion piece to this one. I think I may have posted it before, but couldn't find the link.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Juliet- by Greg Newbold, Acrylic; 8" x 8"

I am not sure that Romeo and Juliet is the best example of love on a day like today, especially given that  these teenage lovers knew one another for a grand total of four days before they both DIED.  Like it or not, there is no arguing that the story has resonated and endured through the centuries.
It is a common misconception that Shakespeare created the plot as well  as the characters in his tragic tale of star crossed lovers, but this would be far from the truth. Read a great account of the history of the Romeo and Juliet myth as well as the many incarnations and adaptations of the most famous love story in history at Artwife Needs a Life.
I painted this version of Juliet as part of a season series I did for the Utah Opera several years ago. It appeared in all their advertising as well as on the posters and program covers

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly- Demo

I have always liked movie westerns so when thinking of what might be a fun subject for a class demo, I figured I would do a gritty cowboy. What movie cowboy was grittier and tougher than Clint Eastwood's man with no name? Eastwood made this character famous in  the Sergio Leone" classic A Fistful of Dollars and sequels A Few Dollars More and the iconic The Good, The Bad and The Ugly?  The first step was to pull a few reference photos and create a drawing.

The final drawing

I didn't want to simply copy a photo, but rather capture a bit of the character's persona and add in a little bit of stylization to the drawing. I used elements from several photos to come up with my drawing which I then projected onto my cold press illustration board. I refined the drawing and added some value using Prismacolor pencils. I like Prismacolors because they don't get scrubbed off when applying wet washes of acrylic paint.

The next step in this mixed media demo, a variation of the technique used by friend and fellow illustrator C.F. Payne, was to apply initial washes of color starting with a nice warm yellow under wash. This process . I followed that with washes of brown for the hat and a flesh tone on the face and then the chosen colors for the shirt and neck bandana. I keep these washes smooth and even by tilting the surface and "drawing the bead" or letting the paint fall along the wet edge to avoid any streaks.

With oil wash lifted out

Next comes the "ugly" step where things can get scary. I apply a purplish wash of very thinned down oil paint in one pass with a wide varnish brush. The oil is very thin and settles down int he valleys of the board texture but since the binders are mostly obliterated by the thinner, it does not fully adhere to the surface. I then lift out the highlight areas using a kneaded eraser and sometimes a pink pearl eraser.

After Prismacolor application

When I have lifted all the areas I want to remove, I spray the surface with a photo retouch varnish to seal off the oil and give the surface a little tooth in preparation for some Prismacolor. This step can be overdone, so I use the pencil fairy sparingly and apply it with a light touch.

Stopping place- still a lot of work to do to finish

After I am satisfied with some of the colored pencil application, I come back with more acrylic and keep working the surface, pushing the lights and the darks, alternating back and forth with a little more pencil if needed until I am finished. I stopped this demo after two and a half hours, but there is still quite a bit of work left yet to finish this one up right. I'll post the final version sometime later and link to this post.

Addendum: The Finished Painting

The Good, The Bad and The Ugly - Mixed Media, 10" x 12'

Here is what the finished demo turned out like. I worked on it for maybe another3 to 4 hours in two sessions after I stopped the above demo. Total working time including sketch was about 8 hours. As you can see from the above photo, I spent a fair amount of time adding detail in areas such as the hatband and the beard. I also cleaned up and strengthened contrasts in the background while still keeping it ambiguous and non distracting. I added a stronger rim lighting on the edges to give the feel of bright sunlight.I'm pretty happy with how it finished up.

The Messenger

The Messenger- acrylic 5.5" x 8"

I found this while rummaging around the studio and it fits this week's Illustration Friday theme perfectly. It was for a story about a man who received a message from an angel while sleeping. Sometimes, I think we can all use a little inspiration from above.

Renaissance Portrait Progress 3

Lest you think that this project is the only one I have on the table at the moment, never fear. I actually have a number of projects going on, but they are all for a major educational publisher. I am under a non disclosure agreement, so I can't show or talk about them right now. Sometime down the road, I'll show some of that, but in the meantime, I'll show more progress on this little portrait. As you can compare to the last session, I have just about finished up the background and the faces are almost finished now, just a little more modeling and highlights to go. the clothes and hands have a bit further to go, so a couple more days and I think I'll wrap this up. I have another deadline this week, so It'll be tricky to get both of them done. I also have sketches for another project I need to get out before the end of the week as well. Wish me luck!

Part 1 of this project
Part 2 of this project
Part 4 of this project (finish)
Gold Leafing of the frame/panel for this project

Renaissance Portrait Progress 2

Here's where the portrait project sits after another session of painting. It's always a little nerve wracking to show stuff that is not finished. There is always seems to be a point (or two or three) at which you hate how things are going, but you have to forge on, believing that you can pull things out of the fire. This one is actually going about as well as I had wanted, so I hope that moment of doom is not on the horizon. I have blocked in basic colors in the figures and I am working  the skin tones on the woman's face. I am pretty happy with the overall color scheme, so now it is a matter of pushing contrasts and getting all the details worked in. Skin tones are always the hardest to get right, so I am taking extra care there. This portrait project has been a fun change of pace and I am liking how it's turning out. I predict a happy recipient on Christmas Day.

Part 1 of this project
Part 3 of this project
Part 4 of this project (finish)
Gold Leafing of the frame/panel for this project

Renaissance Portrait Progress

I just got off another project and back onto the portrait project I showed a little bit about in an earlier post. I'll be making steady progress until this is finished since it is a Christmas present.  After I got the drawing approved, I changes it to a sepia tone and ran it out on some nice printmaking paper. I'll nearly complete the picture before adhering it into the panel.

I sealed the paper on both sides with some acrylic matte medium and had just enough time the other night to lay in some basic color tones in the background. I started with a burnt sienna tone and then added the greens of the trees and the sky and cloud colors. Still a long way to go. I'll post progress as I go along.

Part 2 of this project
Part 3 of this project
Part 4 of this project (finish)
Gold Leafing of the frame/panel for this project

Burn Your Bad Work? No, Just Repaint

Yellowstone (after cropping and repainting) 6.75" x 12" - acrylic.

Ever wonder what to do with all those old illustrations laying around your studio? you know the ones that were so specific and had so many dead areas left for type that they are practically useless? I have burned a few bad ones over the years, but rather than torching them all and having the fire brigade on my doorstep, I have started cropping and repainting them. I have a collector friend that has been buying a piece from me every Christmas for the last few years. Last year I pulled out a few candidates for him to choose from and he found one he liked. Well sort of liked. He wanted me to paint out the figure of the hiker. I happily complied and was pleased with the results which I posted earlier here. This got me thinking of how many useless pieces I have laying around. Those paintings that have good elements, but that are not really suitable to hang on your wall, nor are they attractive enough to put in your portfolio or resell.

Here is the painting after I cut it down

I figured I could crop, repaint or collage elements from one of these otherwise bonfire worthy pieces and turn it into something good. There are thousands of hours of work collected in my flat file and it seems dumb to waste these paintings, so I think I'll be doing more of this in the future. This time, I found one that needed some serious cropping and repainting to make it wall worthy.

Tape lines indicate where I wanted to crop

Here is how it looked before I started reworking it and re assembled with it's original parts after. At least half of the picture area was blank because of type restrictions the publisher placed on me. In this new version, the moose got exiled from his habitat since he didn't fit the new vision. Also, the sky got completely revised as did many of the trees and the thermal pool on the left. In the end, a piece that was practically worthless before now will have an honored place on my collector's home office wall.

Feeling Round?

One of my favorite things about the day after Thanksgiving is... not shopping. Actually I like to eat a nice turkey sandwich while catching some football on TV. Not that I need anything to make me feel round after the delicious feast yesterday, but who can resist all those tasty leftovers? The Illustration Friday theme for today is "round". That combined with the football game on TV reminded me of an illustration I did right out of college for a local magazine. It was about the gourmet nature of certain tailgate parties. Given how long this took to paint, I am pretty sure I got paid about $8 an hour for this thing. But I was glad to get anything printed way back then. This was done in 1992, about a year and a half before I dove headfirst into a full time freelance career. At the time, I was looking for a way out of my desk job illustrating educational software on a computer that resembled something out of the Flintstones. 

Sam Weber Demo

Illustrator Sam Weber has become a household fixture in the industry in just six short years. Looking at Sam's work today, you would scarcely believe he spent the first couple of years of his career with relatively little work on the table, which makes his rise to success even more impressive.

Sam earned a BFA in Calgary, Canada where he met his wife artist Jillian Tamaki and continued on to earn an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New Your City. He credits his time there with instilling within him a more independent attitude toward art. It also shattered some of his illusions about famous illustrators saying that living in New York rids you of being star struck pretty quickly.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet Sam and see him work during his visit to Brigham Young University where I teach. He shared many words of wisdom with those in attendance as well as a  wonderful demonstration of his working process.

Sam Begins by sketching out his ideas and then gathers reference material from a variety of sources. He stressed the importance of creating your own reference in order to control your vision. He frequently brings professional models into his Brooklyn, New York studio to shoot, ensuring that he gets exactly the pose and details he wants. Once the drawing is established, he uses a graphite transfer method to get the drawing onto his painting surface.

Weber prefers painting on Fabriano 300 lb. hot press paper. He likes the smooth surface and ability to remain relatively flat even during successive washes of wet paint without stretching. Because Weber's work frequently requires large areas of white or nearly white paper, he masks off these areas using a high tack frisket film. Sam likes to build up areas of color and value slowly using multiple washes of very thin acrylic in a watercolor style. His paint of choice is Golden Fluid acrylic paint since it requires less dilution to it reduce to the consistency he likes.

When building up value and texture, Sam employs many different tools to achieve organic results.He has a collection of natural sponges that he uses and also likes to press a sheet of Plexiglass into a wet wash to get random textures. Weber continues glazing wet into wet and building up values that retain soft edges and textures.As he gets more layers built up, the paint becomes dryer and he scumbles the paint more.

Throughout the demo, Sam threw out advice and hard gained wisdom to the group He said the sketching process is his favorite part because that is when all the potential still exists. The excitement swells and then sinks to uncertainty in the middle and then settles into relief at the finish when it all works out. Weber advocates setting aside time for personal work as the most interesting leaps and growth come from exploration.

After a little more than two hours of building up the acrylic washes, Sam then shifted to Photoshop for the finishing touches which is how he finishes nearly all his work. He scanned the image full size at 700 dpi. Using multiply layers, he continues with digital glazes of color to refine the value patterns and sharpen edges. Color dodge was used to achieve highlights toward the end. This was a fairly simple subject, so there were not a lot of tricky digital effects, but Sam will employ various selections and quick masks in order to get the effects he wants.

Of the first couple of dry years, Sam said that it was only when he shifted his subject matter to be more accessible that he became popular. He likened it to two slightly overlapping circles. In one is the work you like to do. The other contains what people want. Within the space that overlaps lies the work that you should pursue. Weber advised students to create an entirely new portfolio every six months stressing that illustration is not a part time job and that you may never feel ready to begin an illustration career- this is normal. Proceed as planned. It appears to me that Sam Weber is proceeding very nicely.

Fueling the Fire

Fueling the Fire- 11.5" x 12" acrylic/mixed media by Greg Newbold

Sometimes the only way to keep the wolves at bay is to fuel the fire. Make sure your creative fire is always stoked with new and interesting projects. I have found over the years that I have to take time to do work that is just for myself or just for fun. The breakthroughs and discoveries I make during these explorations are what keeps me excited to do those inevitable jobs that are less than thrilling, but that pay. By injecting aspects of my explorations into my paying work, I have been able to keep my creative fires burning. If you don't have anything exciting going on in your paying work, come up with a personal project that excites you and get to work. The benefits are enormous and far reaching.

Crowbar's Farewell

Crowbar's Farewell- Acrylic/mixed media; 12" x 18"- Greg Newbold

I did a series of paintings for a story written by Jean Craighead George called When Crowbar Came. Based on a true story of a crow who was befriended by the authors' family and the shenanigans that this very smart crow perpetrated during his time with them.  I painted seven scenes for an educational reading anthology series and this piece was the finale. In the end, the crow decided he belonged with those of his kind. When all the crows scattered like leaves in the wind one fall, Crowbar went with them.

Rebirth of an Unused Concept Sketch

Heart Girl-  12" x 16" Mixed Media/Acrylic

In a post last week, Amy mentioned that the concept sketch for my Songs of Power book cover looked a lot like another one of my later paintings. She was correct. I used the drawing as the basis for a painting I did for Love Communications. They used it on their website and also printed a five foot tall version for their office lobby.

Concept sketch from the Songs of Power cover project

I thought I'd show you how that sketch eventually became another painting. That is one thing about doing numerous idea sketches.Even if you don't end up using an idea at the time, there is no telling where that idea or composition might turn up later.

Revised drawing that was used for the above painting

I keep a file of all my sketches and refer back to them from time to time to see if there is a gem in there that has gone unused. I may have posted this image before, but even if I have, it's worth a look alongside the sketch that inspired it.

Songs of Power Cover

Cover for Songs of Power by Hilari Bell, 14" x 9" acrylic

The cover for "Songs of Power" by Hilari Bell called for a mysterious feel. The protagonist in this YA science fiction/fantasy was a teenage girl of Inuit descent who had the telepathic power to communicate with whales.

First proposed concept sketch

My first concept was a rather straight forward depiction of the girl meditating on the talisman given to her by her grandfather that helped her talk to the whales. Through the porthole of the undersea city where she lived, the whales began to gather.

Final approved sketch. 

The art director Irene Gallo asked me to come up with a more ethereal and mysterious solution. After a fair bit of sketching, I settled on what became the cover image. It became a wraparound image covering both front and back covers. Note the lack of value on the back of  the cover. I would never submit a sketch today without some indication of value patterns. It's a mystery as to why I didn't always do that back in my early career, but I did. I guess I have learned a few things since then.  I went on to create three more cover paintings for Hilari Bell's novels.