Brian's Other Children's Book

Kids Do the Darndest Things!

Sketchbook: from a park in Mexico City.

The girl had been beating bushes with a stick for five minutes. When this finally bored her, she went after a little boy.

As in the U.S., so in Mexico: without good parenting, children are sadistic barbarians.  And they do the darndest things!

The Worst Sketch...

...you may ever see on this blog, is in this post.

It's taken every ounce of humility I've got to post it, but I wanted to respond to Christina's recent posting about the creative process.

The art above is something I did last week for my daughter's birthday. She asked me to make her a drawing with a unicorn and a hamster, and I immediately bristled at the thought of combining two animals so different in scale. Unfortunately, once you tell your 5-year old she can have whatever she wants for her birthday, you're pretty much stuck (In fact, I think that's how John the Baptist died, but I digress.)

Here's the eponymous sketch:

Most of my art starts with a really awful, but useful thumbnail. (Actually some aren't even useful —just awful.) In this case I couldn't stand to look at it long enough to finish it, but it was enough to tell me the concept was okay, and it stood as a rough guide for the work ahead.

After pulling a few images of horses in steeplechases, I got a more refined sketch. You can see that I'm still making decisions about the placement of the front legs. A lot of my rough sketches have three or more limbs.

One the sketch is scanned, I tear the elements apart in Photoshop and nudge them. It's nice to be able to make these refinements without re-tracing the image. I've always found that something gets lost with every iteration.

Here's a cleanup based on the sketch above:

In the final image, I've actually superimposed the cleanup over the early sketch.

I don't use this technique much for my commercial work, because it looks too sketchy for most clients, but I like it for personal stuff. My preliminary work almost always hits these stages though, and I keep most of the nicest sketches. (about 10% of the total)

Velociraptor

This is one of 4 interior illustrations for a yet-to-be-released CD by Rich Rubietta. The song is called "Run From The Raptors" and uses the velociraptor to personify the various commercial interests that prey upon today's youth. Arriving at an appropriate sketch was a difficult balancing act. We both struggled to inject the right degree of warmth and humor into his cautionary statement against rampant consumerism.

I compounded my problem by insisting that the dino should resemble the long-snouted version found in fossil beds rather than an imitation of the familiar Jurassic Park dinos. I stopped short of pushing for raptor feathers and hair.