Gulliver Interior Art 1
30/December/2009
The size of a man is measured by the size of the thing that makes him angry.
Unknown
The Gulliver’s Travels book project I’ve been working on, wrapped up earlier this month, with the completion of the interior line art. This was a great assignment and the people at Random House were fantastic to work with. I’ve posted a few of the pieces here and will add a few more in a follow up.
Jonathon Swift’s story is now considered a children’s classic but was originally conceived as a satiric commentary on human nature. The book is divided into a series of four voyages, with each destination’s setting serving as a foil for the author’s take on the human condition.
The first trip, finds a shipwrecked Gulliver awash on the beach in Lilliput, a land in which everything is one-twelfth normal size, making Gulliver a giant among the population. The tables get turned one hundred eighty degrees on the second trip, when Gulliver arrives in Brobdingnag, a place where everything is twelve times larger than normal. A pirate attack in trip three leaves Gulliver marooned on a deserted atoll, where he is rescued by the residents of Laputa, a flying island. In the final voyage, Gulliver has become a pirate himself, and after being set adrift in a lifeboat by his crew, winds up in a world where horses rule and humans are no more than savage beasts.
I took a very simple approach to creating the drawings for the book, using nothing more than an HB pencil on Strathmore paper. The finished drawings were then scanned, imported into Photoshop, and saved as PS files for delivery to the client.
Frontispiece: A young Gulliver dreams of exploring the world.
The scene everyone recalls from the book, Gulliver washed up on the beach in Lilliput.
Gulliver escapes the Lilliputian king’s wrath in a makeshift sailboat and is rescued by an English ship.
A dumbfounded farm hand discovers Gulliver in a Brobdingnag field and turns him over to a local farmer.
Gulliver is exhibited as a curiosity and coached to perform as a javelin thrower by the farmer’s daughter.
Unknown
The Gulliver’s Travels book project I’ve been working on, wrapped up earlier this month, with the completion of the interior line art. This was a great assignment and the people at Random House were fantastic to work with. I’ve posted a few of the pieces here and will add a few more in a follow up.
Jonathon Swift’s story is now considered a children’s classic but was originally conceived as a satiric commentary on human nature. The book is divided into a series of four voyages, with each destination’s setting serving as a foil for the author’s take on the human condition.
The first trip, finds a shipwrecked Gulliver awash on the beach in Lilliput, a land in which everything is one-twelfth normal size, making Gulliver a giant among the population. The tables get turned one hundred eighty degrees on the second trip, when Gulliver arrives in Brobdingnag, a place where everything is twelve times larger than normal. A pirate attack in trip three leaves Gulliver marooned on a deserted atoll, where he is rescued by the residents of Laputa, a flying island. In the final voyage, Gulliver has become a pirate himself, and after being set adrift in a lifeboat by his crew, winds up in a world where horses rule and humans are no more than savage beasts.
I took a very simple approach to creating the drawings for the book, using nothing more than an HB pencil on Strathmore paper. The finished drawings were then scanned, imported into Photoshop, and saved as PS files for delivery to the client.
Frontispiece: A young Gulliver dreams of exploring the world.
The scene everyone recalls from the book, Gulliver washed up on the beach in Lilliput.
Gulliver escapes the Lilliputian king’s wrath in a makeshift sailboat and is rescued by an English ship.
A dumbfounded farm hand discovers Gulliver in a Brobdingnag field and turns him over to a local farmer.
Gulliver is exhibited as a curiosity and coached to perform as a javelin thrower by the farmer’s daughter.
Happy Holidays!
23/December/2009
I will honor Christmas in my heart and try to keep it all the year.
Charles Dickens
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Best Wishes to all of you who have been kind enough to spend some time here over the past year. Here’s hoping Santa finds your name on the right side of his ledger!
Sketchbook drawing.
Charles Dickens
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and Best Wishes to all of you who have been kind enough to spend some time here over the past year. Here’s hoping Santa finds your name on the right side of his ledger!
Sketchbook drawing.
National Geographic Dinosaurs
10/December/2009
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
Douglas Adams
I recently completed this illustration for National Geographic’s children’s division. The Illustration is for a story about footprints being left behind to fossilize and become archeological evidence of the dinosaurs who used to roam the countryside. The idea was to show a “slice of life” type of scene, in a way that was both realistic and time period correct, but also colorful and eye catching. That meant I was free to amp up the dinos colors and patterns beyond what might typically be considered natural.
Of course, that’s the great thing about painting dinosaurs; the freedom an artist has to push the color/pattern barrier. No matter how high the mountain of fossilized remains may be, no matter how accurately the internal structure may be reconstructed, no one has any proof as to what the dinos exterior actually looked like. Besides who’s to say, maybe I got lucky and my renderings are as accurate as an Audubon bird painting?
My initial pencil was approved with only minor changes, mainly to accomodate type placement. From there it was straight to Photoshop, where the pencil was imported and placed on its own layer, the style set to multiply. The background was painted first, with a few deviations from the pencil overlay here and there to accomodate the revisions or to improve composition. The dinosaurs were roughed in on separate layer groups, that is, one group for each dino. I wanted to get a feel for the overall color of each individual dino, but to reduce the file size and increase PS performance, I didn’t want to paint all the finished dinos in place. At 18”x23” 300 ppi, you have an awful lot of pixels to deal with. Start piling on the layers and the response time suffers like crazy. So each dino was painted individually, using a duplicated and then cropped version of what became the “master” file. This also allowed me to move back and forth between PS and Painter, where I could take advantage of Painter’s texture rendering qualities. As anyone who has tried it knows, attempting to work with a file this size in Painter, would be a miserably frustrating experience. The finished dinos were then placed into the master version, where they were tweaked a bit where necessary. The piece was completed by painting in some transparent shadows on a layer set to Multiply.
Douglas Adams
I recently completed this illustration for National Geographic’s children’s division. The Illustration is for a story about footprints being left behind to fossilize and become archeological evidence of the dinosaurs who used to roam the countryside. The idea was to show a “slice of life” type of scene, in a way that was both realistic and time period correct, but also colorful and eye catching. That meant I was free to amp up the dinos colors and patterns beyond what might typically be considered natural.
Of course, that’s the great thing about painting dinosaurs; the freedom an artist has to push the color/pattern barrier. No matter how high the mountain of fossilized remains may be, no matter how accurately the internal structure may be reconstructed, no one has any proof as to what the dinos exterior actually looked like. Besides who’s to say, maybe I got lucky and my renderings are as accurate as an Audubon bird painting?
My initial pencil was approved with only minor changes, mainly to accomodate type placement. From there it was straight to Photoshop, where the pencil was imported and placed on its own layer, the style set to multiply. The background was painted first, with a few deviations from the pencil overlay here and there to accomodate the revisions or to improve composition. The dinosaurs were roughed in on separate layer groups, that is, one group for each dino. I wanted to get a feel for the overall color of each individual dino, but to reduce the file size and increase PS performance, I didn’t want to paint all the finished dinos in place. At 18”x23” 300 ppi, you have an awful lot of pixels to deal with. Start piling on the layers and the response time suffers like crazy. So each dino was painted individually, using a duplicated and then cropped version of what became the “master” file. This also allowed me to move back and forth between PS and Painter, where I could take advantage of Painter’s texture rendering qualities. As anyone who has tried it knows, attempting to work with a file this size in Painter, would be a miserably frustrating experience. The finished dinos were then placed into the master version, where they were tweaked a bit where necessary. The piece was completed by painting in some transparent shadows on a layer set to Multiply.