Quantum Uncertainty - Process

Scientific American is one of those milestone clients for me. I was pretty excited when Michael Mrak called, but the story itself was what sold it to me. It was well within my gamut of interests. I had a lot of fun with it. Here is the process from sketch to finish. I'm not posting thumbnails this time. There were some pretty cool ones that I want to use for some personal work later.

Glitches for Tor.com

This project starts with me busting my knee while climbing, scaring the hair off of my friend Renee, her first time belaying me. Irene called me for a project during thanksgiving week, and truth be told, I wasn't going anywhere for a while (as Chris so kindly pointed out); So why not work on an illo for a wicked story? Plus I would never say no to Irene. If I really detail how much I like working with her, I'd have a restraining order in my hands. I'm busy handling Ted's while we're on that matter.

This time around, the story is called Glitches, written by Marissa Meyer. It is a prequel to her book, Cinder.



Thumbnails flowed easily this time around. They normally do with stories from Tor. Like I've mentioned before, Irene takes the cookie on matching stories with illustrators. This translates beneficially for the artist. Sometimes the mood of the story matches perfectly with the artist's work, sometimes it's the characters, or the setting. Whatever it may be, with her projects, there's always something evident for one to latch onto. After a single read, I had collected plenty of concepts to work with, the main theme being a juxtaposition of inorganic over organic.

Number 2 being the choice, I sent Irene a somewhat cleaned/incomplete inked drawing. I'll explain why...

Here's what I showed Irene...



Here's what the complete one looked like...



Irene is a seasoned art director. Far be it from me to doubt her skills at understanding what I had drawn. My reason behind it is always that I hate to leave my art directors treading on too much faith. They're already putting a lot of trust in me by handing me a project, best not to push it. This time, it was easier to say "looks a bit empty now, but the background will be filled out" than "I'll make some sense of this mess, please trust me".

While on this stage we also went over some tweaks on Cinder's mouth. When working with linework, any tiny detail makes a giant difference. Irene pointed out that the lines describing her philtrum and upper lip gave her the appearance of a more mature woman. In the end, we decided to remove them altogether since we were aiming to make her look like the young teenager that the character is.



After a couple of color schemes, we chose the green dress. By the time I was done with this illo, my knee was back to normal (ish), so I'm back to finding new ways to destroy my body against a wall.

Ghost Hedgehog for Tor

I feel Irene has mastered the art of matching stories with illustrators. Every time I get a project from her, I get all giddy. Nina Kiriki Hoffman's Ghost Hedgehog is a really cool story of a boy who serves as temporary ride for souls in search of closure. Her visuals are quirky and inventive, and her characters are nicely developed. It provided me plenty to play with. I would've been happy to finish any one of these thumbs, which may not be the case of every project :S



Sketch level was a bit of a challenge. Drawing 11ish year old girls is a pain. You just kinda get used to drawing fully grown adults, awkward teenagers, or cute young kids, mostly toddlers. But 11-12 year old girls are somewhat of a gray area. I just couldn't get the expressions and proportions right. There was a lot of research and A TON of girls before the ones that reached finals. These are the least embarrassing two.



And this is the drawing that went to final. By the way, the reason why the boy was not a hassle, my nephew is 11 years old.



I went through a bunch of color schemes with this one. Here's the four that I showed Irene. It's a good thing the first two were a no go. That kid looks like he's miserably walking back from a birthday party his mom made him attend since "it would've been very rude not to". Green was the first one I really liked, but then I tried some reds as well since the story has lots of them (you haven't read it yet?!).



A few emails back and forth, and Irene and I went for green.

Euroman Process & Gesturing

During a recent class, one of my students approached me with a very common concern. In her mind, she could visualize her figures and how these fell within the composition of her illustration. Once drawn on paper though, these looked nothing like they did in her thoughts. On the other side, her attention to detail was impeccable. This made me realize that I had been ignoring the basis of her problem. We found out she was paying plenty of attention to detail but ignoring the base gestures to build upon. It is a problem that I had neglected to see, as most of my students have already acquired this knowledge and put it to good practice through their foundation classes. After a few lessons on gesturing and its importance, the student reached a control over her figures she hadn't grasped before.

The information here is amply discussed on hundreds of books and websites. This doesn't make it any less relevant. So I'll take the chance and explain how I use gestures in my process through this project done for Euroman and art directed by Sune Ehlers, who is also a phenomenal artist.



During thumbnail stage, I don't normally bother with correcting the figures. The main concern here is gesturing the right compositions. Keeping them as simple as possible makes them easier to read.


After moving to sketch level, the real figure gesturing starts. At this point, the main concern is to get the right proportions and motion. Getting into proportions, my concern isn't really making the figure look correct as much as believable. Sure, the proportions might not be those of a real human, but if it looks alright and makes the illustration interesting, then that's good enough for me. I also keep the figures undressed at this point... or at least most of them. The ones in the back I don't care for as much as the one in the front, so I roughly gesture them clothed.



And then they get dressed, keeping in mind that every added clothing detail will seriously affect the composition.

Once the inking begins, a couple of details may shift here and there, but the main idea remains. Remember that thing I just mentioned about elements seriously affecting the composition? Well, say hello to that unwrapped turban. Nonetheless, the gesture underneath dictates almost everything. This may sound constricting, but it's a really good safety net to fall upon once the illustration starts getting complicated.



Oh yeah... and there's that thing about the background. After that, what remains are a few layers to color this number up.