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Peter Spit… cover ideas

A bunch of cover ideas for Peter Spit A Seed At Sue.

These are all rough sketches, drawn about the size of a playing card.  One idea was selected, and I drew a tight sketch—

Please add the watermelons!

Art director Jim Hoover creates a comp with sketch and type. Let’s get the other 2 kids in there.

I painted the cover with a watermelon pink background.

This color was thought to be too feminine, so through the magic of digital correction, the background color was changed.  (I didn’t do it.  I don’t know which buttons to push.)

Five not-too-bad cover ideas

People do judge a book by its cover.  Or at least, it’s the cover that gets people to pick up the book in the bookstore and see whether they like it.  Here are rough cover ideas for Two Bad Pilgrims.

cover1

coverA

coverB

coverC

coverD

Art Director Jim Hoover liked Idea A  I did tight sketches of the boys, the New Worlde mappe and the title type, which Jim put together as a comp.

pilg.cover_comp-1

pilg.covertype

pilg.covermap

The boys and the map are painted as a single image.  One last request: show the boys having burst through the map.  The compass rose is a separate piece of art.  The type I inked in as separate black & white art.  Jim Hoover combined these elements into one cover image and added the credits at the bottom.

511VudukEWL._SS500_

Hide and shriek!

Here’s the opening spread from Where’s My Mummy? This scene shows Mama Mummy getting Baby Mummy ready for bed—but Baby wants to play one more round of hide & shriek.

Since they’re mummies, I designed an interior to look like the inside of a pyramid, with lots of Egyptian details.  The legendary art director at Candlewick, Caroline Lawrence, felt the setting didn’t convey enough ghoulishness, so she asked me to redraw the scene with a gothic interior.

mummy0607

Revised sketch with gothic details below.  Architecture geeks will note the new shape of the columns, rough-hewn stone walls and groined vault arched ceiling.

mummy.revise.0607

I changed the oil-burning lamp to a candelabrum, but doused the candles in the color version because they were causing me lighting/shadow problems.  I kept the sarcophagus bed from the first sketch.

mummy_01

The light is coming from a single source.  More dramatic and easier to paint.  Also, the viewer’s eye naturally looks to the light source, which is where I put Baby Mummy.

 

Weird sisters

MAGIC

“Double, double toil and trouble; Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.” Macbeth (Act IV, Scene I).

I did this painting as a self-promotion piece a few years ago.  Promotion is critical to any business; it’s especially important to illustrators.  We are, by and large, self-employed: we work for ourselves.  We operate on small budgets, so we’ve got to be clever about how we let the world know we’re here.

This image appeared in a creative directory, Picturebook.  A creative directory is a catalogue of illustration (or photography) that comes out once a year and is sent to art buyers, like art directors.  The art buyers receive the directory for free.  The illustrators featured inside the directory paid for their page.  That fee covers the cost of producing and distributing the directory to the art buyers.

Most creative directories cover a spectrum of markets, from editorial to advertising.  Picturebook concentrates on just one slice of the illustration market: children’s books.  A page in Picturebook works more effectively for me because it goes specifically to the audience I want to reach.  So far as I know, ad agency AD’s don’t receive Picturebook.

Incidentally, this lovely image is available as a print.

More Henry sketches

Here’s the thumbnail sketch for the opening spread of Henry & the Crazed Chicken Pirates.  Like in a movie, this establishing shot offers a broad swathe of visual information that tells the reader where the story takes place.  The crew of the Salty Carrot frolics in a tropical lagoon where their dear old barky is moored.  0405.tn.chickens

The art director asked that the image be flopped—the ship should face right instead of left.  I begin tracing the ship drawing on a piece of translucent paper through which you can see the layout with the enlarged thumbnail.

ship190

Ships are complicated things to draw.  I trace the scene at least one more time.

H&CC0607

I like to place something like foliage in the foreground, so the reader has the sensation of looking through one plane to see another.  To make this scene truly idyllic, I added a waterfall in the background.

Fireflies

I want to warn you ahead of time that I don’t have the finished illustration that would normally follow the series of sketches below.  I must have gotten rid of it, or else it’s boxed away somewhere in my attic (I moved last November and am still unpacking).

A while back I got an assignment to illustrate a cover for a summer issue of StoryWorks magazine.  The art director asked for fireflies reading books. Sounds like a fun idea—I went to work drawing variations of it.

The first one works, but it’s kind of the obvious solution:

firefly.book

I like this next one in spite of its being a little weird.  To make it work I’d need to really play up the lighting effects:

firefly.bed

Fireflies reading books in a bookstore after hours:

firefly.bookstore

Fireflies combining their individual lights to read a book:

firefly.jar

Firefly using a flashlight, with a farm in the background:

firefly.farm

And here are fireflies using each other’s butts to read by:

firefly.circle

Those were the ideas I came up with.  The AD liked the last two, couldn’t decide which one to use—and asked me to combine them in one sketch:

newfirefly

I wasn’t happy with it.  Too many elements, too difficult to read the idea.  I would have loved to paint any of the other sketches, but it wasn’t meant to be.  Nobody’s fault; the art director and I just had different tastes.  That’s the way it goes sometimes.  You do your work, get your paycheck, and move on.

How To Become An Illustrator, Canto IV

Step Four.  Promote.

Once you’ve got your portfolio together, you want people to see it—specifically people who can hire you.

Let’s make this an assault on multiple fronts.  You young illustrators have many media available for self-promotion.

The world-wide web. Get yourself a website.  It doesn’t need to be fancy, just a place to put up some samples of your work and your contact information.  Nowadays everybody expects to be able to find you on the web, so make sure you’re there.  Because we live in an age of technological marvels, you can build a website yourself, for free: http://www.moogo.com/.  Here’s a review.

I’ve noticed illustrators have been posting their samples on flickr, which doesn’t cost you anything, either.  Same with Facebook.

Print media. Even though I have a web presence, I rely on print media to let potential clients know I’m there.  I strongly recommend that you consider a postcard mailing campaign.  This will cost you a few skins, but I’ve found the return on investment to be worthwhile.  I go to Modern Postcard to print my postcards.  They’re in California and all they do is print postcards.  A batch of 500 will set you back around $120.00.  Once you go to their website, they really take care of you.  There are downloadable templates so you may design your postcard to fit US postal requirements.  You may submit everything to them electronically.  They’ll turn your job around in less than 2 weeks.

Put a show-stopping four-color image on the front of your postcard, and tell everyone how to find you on the back.  If you can afford it, consider sending a series of postcards that tell a story. I did this and I got a great response from art directors—and a couple of jobs.  I told a story in four images, and mailed my postcards every Monday for 4 weeks.  By the time the fourth postcard was mailed, the ADs were waiting for it.

You’ll need a mailing list of people who might hire you. When I began, I wanted to break into children’s publishing, so I needed a list of art directors who work for children’s magazine and book publishers.  I transcribed my list from Children’s Artists’ & Writers’ Market.  If kids’ illustration isn’t your bag, a more general list can be gleaned from the 2009 Artist’s & Graphic Designer’s Market Of course you can buy mailing lists, but I prefer to build and maintain my own.  Don’t forget to send a postcard to every member of your family and everyone you’ve ever met.  You never know who may turn out to be an important contact.

Creative directories. These are catalogues of illustrators—you buy a page, put your images on it and the directory is sent out to zillions of art directors.  This can get pricey.  I stick with Picture Book only. I’ve tried some of the others, and I’d never been able to establish that I got a return on my investment; that is, the page didn’t generate more fees than I paid for it.  Picture Book is a small slice of the illustration market—children’s only—which is the more effective way for me to promote myself.

Competitions. Don’t necessarily generate sales.

All your promotion should be run at a profit.  If you spend a dollar on promotion and don’t get more than a dollar back, stop doing that kind of promotion and try something else.

Get this book and read it: Your Marketing Sucks.

DON’T e-mail art directors with unsolicited samples.

How To Become An Illustrator, Canto III

Anyone left in the room?  If you read Steps One and Two and you’re still here, you must really want to be an illustrator.

Okay.  You have a day job, you’ve begun the process of organizing your business—now let’s move on to

Step Three.  Build a portfolio.

Who is your market?  Figure out who your potential customers are.  Take a hard look at the work you like to do and honestly determine where it would fit—editorial, children’s publishing, game animation, corporate, advertising, greeting card (just naming these off the top of my head).

The Society of Illustrators publishes a catalogue of their annual competition.  It’s divided into sections: advertising, corporate, publishing, editorial.  Looking at the different styles of work in those categories may help you choose your market.

Do the research.  For instance, if you want to do kids’ books, go to a bookstore and see how compatible your illustrations are with what you find in the kids’ section.

Now comes the tough love.  If you want to sell illustration you’ll need to stick with one style and market that style exclusively.  Don’t make your portfolio a mixed bag of styles.  It’s really difficult to sell a portfolio like that, simply because an art director wouldn’t be sure what you’d deliver if he gave you an assignment.  You may have to choose between two favorite styles—and say good-bye to one of them.

Put together a portfolio of 6—8 samples of your very best work.  They don’t need to have been published.  Get your samples scanned.

Invest in a professional-looking portfolio case.  Put into it prints of your work—not originals!  They should be in poly sleeves, or get them laminated. Every sample should have your contact information on it somewhere. Get extras printed as leave-behinds.  On the handle, put one of those name-tag thingies with your business card—because sometimes art directors ask that you drop off your portfolio.

I was tempted to suggest burning a cd of your samples, but I don’t feel comfortable with the idea of making your images as accessible as clip art.  And even in this digital age, ADs like to see printed samples they can hold.  When I visit clients I take a portfolio with printed samples because often the meeting is in a conference room with no computer handy.

All this is just one guy’s opinion; these suggestions have worked for me.  I’d be interested to hear if any ADs or illustrators want to weigh in.