My assembly line

Brandon writes:

Hey John, I noticed back in 2010, you said that you paint all your backgrounds first and then your characters to get a consistent look. Does that mean you have 16 masonite boards with paper taped to them throughout your studio? Or are you reusing masonite or doing something completely different? Thanks. Your website is incredibly informative. You’re a champ.

For any book project I’m working on, I have sixteen 3/16″ plywood boards with watercolor paper stapled to them. They are each 24″ x 16′. I like to paint on Arches 300 lb hot press watercolor paper, which comes in 22″ x 30″ sheets. Cut in half, that’s 22″ x 15″ which fits nicely onto my plywood boards. I staple the paper on with a staple gun. I trace the sketch onto the paper using transfer paper (like carbon paper) and mask off 3/4″ beyond the page trim with masking tape.

Why sixteen? A typical picture book is 32 pages long, and I can get a two-page spread onto one of those 22″ x 15″ sheets. Sixteen times two is thirty-two. The cover art is usually done before I start on the interior pages, so that would be a 17th board.

This is an efficient way for me to work. I can put a board on my easel, paint the sky, then put that to one side and grab another board and paint the sky. When the sky is finished on all the boards, I start painting backgrounds. I work from far to near. The very last thing I paint are the characters.

Jack and the Giant Barbecue color studies

Here are close-up scans of the color studies I created for Jack and the Giant Barbecue. They’re shown here individually, but they were created together on one big piece of watercolor paper as a color script. Each study is roughly 6″ x 4″.

These studies will be framed and for sale at the Giant Barbecue Party tomorrow!

[slideshow]

Inside the jukebox

Here is an image I was very excited to draw from Jack and the Giant Barbecue—Jack inside the jukebox, trying to get at his daddy’s recipe book.  In the original manuscript the giant had hidden the recipe book inside a cash register. We ran into trouble when drawing that because a cash register and a jukebox are similar in shape—box-y with a rounded top—so would have been confusing to the reader. We needed to hide the book somewhere else. Eric Kimmel asked me “How do you feel about having Jack lay low in the innards of a jukebox?” Well, as he guessed, I loved it. Here are the sketches, a couple of photos of a jukebox’ innards, and the final painting.

Dennis

A caricature of my old pal Dennis Dittrich

Masking fluid

Masking fluid (or liquid frisket) is a pretty handy item to have around. Many of the scenes in Jack and the Giant Barbecue have characters in front of the big, wild & woolly American West. I like to spread out and paint that kind of backdrop with equally wild brush strokes. That’s a whole lot easier if you don’t have to carefully paint around the characters.

Masking fluid is kind of a rubbery syrup that you paint on your paper wherever you don’t want watercolor. It dries to a water-repellant film. As you see in the pictures, I masked out Jack and his faithful pony (also using bits of masking tape) so I could slather on the paint with abandon.When I finished painting the background, I peeled away the mask using a rubber cement pickup.

[slideshow]

With trumpets a-tooting

Another night-time party scene from Let’s Have A Tree Party! A thumbnail sketch, tight sketch, the painting in progress and the final illustration. My former student Julia Kapp assisted with blocking in the big areas of color for this book. As anyone who has worked with gouache can tell you, laying down a perfect velvety blue sky isn’t so easy.

This image and the paintings from the previous 2 posts will be part of the ArtisTree exhibit in the Graffiti Gallery—that’s in Oil City, Pennsylvania. It’s supposed to be a beautiful day tomorrow, so come on over for the Transit artists’ Open Studios (noon – 5:00) and stay for the gallery reception (4:00 – 7:00).

Moon

Here’s a night-time scene from Let’s Have A Tree Party! The sun’s gone down and the animals say ‘hi’ to the moon.

Thumbnail sketch, tight sketch, some shots of the painting in progress and the final illustration.

To the tree!

Here’s the copyright/dedication spread for Let’s Have A Tree Party! from Candlewick Press. It’s the first big image you see, so this is the establishing shot. It tells you where the story takes place.