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Paper/Pencil/Brush.

My pal Margeaux Lucas has a blog, Paper/Pencil/Brush.  She shows a lovely example of underpainting in a gouache illustration.

Her style reminds me of picture books I read when I was little.  It’s all too easy to become heavy-handed with gouache, especially when you’re piling paint on top of paint, as you’re obliged to do with an underpainting.  Margeaux has kept this enchanting little image light and fresh.  Also, look how much information she gives you: time of year, place, who the main character is, anticipation of some future event—all important to an audience who is just learning to read.

Two Bad Pilgrims’ progress

Here’s the big scene from Two Bad Pilgrims, where Francis and Johnny nearly scuttle the Mayflower when they fool around with their father’s fowling piece.  First the thumbnail sketch:

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Then the tight sketch:

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There was some squeamishness about showing two boys firing a gun in a kids’ book, so we tried a different approach.  Sometimes you encounter this kind of snag in the creative process.  Kendra Levin, the editor and Jim Hoover, the art director worked with me to find a solution.  How about if instead of the gun, we show the boys playing with squibs?

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What the heck is a squib?  Here’s where my dad, and the Company of Military Historians really came to the rescue.  My dad posted the question in the forum page of the Company’s website.  Turns out a squib is a thin tube of paper or a hollow quill filled with black gunpowder—homemade fireworks.  When you light one it zips around the room.

But, this isn’t really what happened aboard the Mayflower.  More important, it’s not as interesting to look at.  We ultimately struck a compromise and decided to show the boys with the gun, but not actually firing it.

Here’s the inked in version.  Squibs, a barrel of gunpowder, straw ticking on the bunk, old wooden planking—all the ingredients for setting a ship afire.

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It seems nuts to have gunpowder just laying around like that, but according to Mourt that’s the way it was.  I know that British warships in Nelson’s time stored all gunpowder in a special room, the magazine.  It was lit by a lamp on the other side of a glass window.  Anyone in the magazine had to wear slippers, because the nail of a shoe grating across powder on the floor would cause a spark, blowing up the ship.

Here’s the color sketch.

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And Vince Dorse’s colorization.

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Being John Singer Sargent

I’m working on paintings (finishing them up, actually) for a story about a cat who lives in Venice circa 1890.  Since the publisher refused to send me to la Serenissima to gather visual research (hey, you can’t blame a boy for asking!), I was forced to make do with the beautiful paintings of John Singer Sargent, who lived in Venice at the same time our cat did.

To help me get a feel for the color scheme, or palette, I did small color studies of some of Sargent’s Venetian paintings.  Here’s his painting of the Rialto:

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…and my study of it.

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I recommend this kind of exercise.  I learned so much about color from Sargent by mimicking his paintings.  Here are more:

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A piu tardi—

Later—

Underpainting

When I paint, my favorite medium is gouache (rhymes with squash).  It’s opaque watercolor and versatile: I can water the colors down to transparency or paint them on thick and opaque.  If I need to make a change after the paint’s dry, I can soak off most of the paint with a damp paper towel and start over.

Since my style is so cartoony—which was not a selling point with children’s art directors when I started out—I learned to paint in a classic sort of way.  My goal is to make objects in my pictures look three-dimensional by modeling them, by rendering the light and shadow.

Figuring out light and shadow while worrying about color is not easy!  I found it’s simplest to separate the two activities.  I paint light and shadow first, then add color on top later.

The first step is called underpainting.  I like to use a warm brown, Burnt Sienna, for that step.

Here’s a page from Where’s My Mummy? another collaboration with my pal Carolyn Crimi. This story is about Baby Mummy’s one last game of hide-and-go-shriek before bedtime.  All the monsters in the graveyard are getting ready for bed.

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I should mention that as usual, I was behind schedule with this project and got lots of painting help from the talented Rhonda Libbey, who blocked in big areas of color.

Okay, first the sketch:

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You can already see many of the shadows in the sketch.  The scene’s a graveyard, so shadows are important for mood.  Here are the shadows painted in Burnt Sienna:

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You should be able to tell from which direction the light’s coming.  I try to avoid detail in the underpainting and concentrate on the masses of light and dark.  It’s really an abstract design.  I didn’t paint the vines growing on the tombstones, for instance.  Now here’s the color painted on top of the warm brown underpainting:

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I was trying to evoke those old black and white monster movies, so I used a very restrained palette, or range of colors.  There are few bright colors in this book.

One of the nice things about the warm Burnt Sienna underpainting is that it peeks through the cold neutral overpainting here and there.  I think that the underpainting also helps to unify the illustration by giving all the colors something in common.

You’ll notice that I haven’t yet painted the Baby Mummy.  First I paint my backgounds, then  I paint the characters.  That helps me keep all those elements consistent throughout the 32-page book.

Here’s another image—in progress—from the same book.  I haven’t painted the characters yet, just the background.

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And here’s the finished painting.  Dracula gets a bright red bathrobe.

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