Had an opportunity to start painting color in ArtRage.

Ok, haven't posted anything here in forever because, until recently, I've been really busy with commercial work. I've been writing a Robots of Doom book. It started as a picture book, morphed into an early-reader chapter book and then morphed again into a young-reader chapter book. I guess it'll basically be shooting at the same age group as the Lemony Snicket books.  Anyhoo, I needed a new character in the book and decided to do a new illustration because it's easier to write about something if I can actually see it. So here is the line art for the new illustration. Hopefully, I can get to applying color tonight while listening to Prairie Home Companion.

Here's a piece I did for the story I'm writing as the beginning of Robots of Doom. So far I have 30-some pages written. I took it to an  SCBWI conference and got some really good feedback at a writers' critique. It'll require a good deal of re-writing but I think it's a solid story. Unfortunately, it is no longer a picture book but is more YA kinda thing. Oh well.

This is an old oil painting re-purposed for the first episode of Robots of Doom. The banner and a bunch of the webbing was done in ArtRage over a scan of the original oil painting.

Woot woot, robot done, now onto the background, foreground and underground!

Making some progress on the Robots of Doom project.  Spent all day and evening Saturday working on this new illustration and writing a book version of the story to pitch at a children's publishing conference in a few weeks.  That's right, a whole book!

This illustration process could use some explaining. I first did a wireframe sketch of the robot in Photoshop because it's so  much easier to build circles and ellipses and move them about to get them right. Then I printed that out, did some pencil shading on it to get my light and shadows where I want them. Then I slipped that under some tracing vellum to render the line art with a Dark Brown Prismacolor pencil. Then I scanned that, cleaned it up and imported it into ArtRage to color with it's watercolor brushes. There will be an entire scene with a street view and crows on a wire, but I'm doing the entire illustration in layers for maximum adaptability.

Ta da!