Gallery

Welcome to the gallery. Here you can see black and white versions of the original artwork. Not all images made it into the final story. Some were edited out to help create a better flow.

From concept to creation

When creating a new story I begin by writing down ideas and writing a draft of the story, Creating a mock up book is the first step. Next, I go through and write down what parts of the story would be best in creating an image. I come up with an idea for a sketch and draw it with pencil. For this project I used black sharpies and colored over the pencil sketch. The last step is to scan the image in and color it in photo shop. The writing process is different. I wrote a few drafts and sent it to an editor. I then get the revised copy back. Make changes in the text and change illustrations or drop them from the story. Sometimes an image doesn't work with the text, therefore it's best to drop it from the story or re-illustrated it.

The design of illustration

The look for the book was inspired by art nouveau. I wanted to create a new style of drawing that carried a swirl motif through-out the book. My intent was to focus on line and shape. With the suggestion of a few other artist I colored the images in with the help of the photo shop. Character design is influenced by disney artist and anime from Japan. The heavy line work throughout the drawing creates repetition and implied lines. The positive and negative shapes in these drawings help keep the viewer eyes within the pages. Any similarities to actual art work are completely accidental, since i wasn't looking at any source material when creating these. I understand the importance of source material, but there was nothing I could find that imitate this unique illustration style, I wish to create.