I have this on my pinboard at my desk. It's the drawings which make up the last stop frame I made. I pretty much did most of them on one piece of paper as you can see. It's where my eyes settle, unseeing, when i'm glazed over in thought.




Technorati: stop frame animation, bird flying, bird taking flight,

Blah

Did a quick sloppy digital colouring job on the graveyard gates scene just to compare. I HATE it. Definately sticking with traditional methods, even though it's more difficult to look good once scanned in.

Quick digital mock ups may be useful to decide what colours to use though :) so something good came of it.

Miss Flexy McStretch

Some more flexy drawings

Men hmmm

Some random little sketches.
Getting used to drawing men.
Hopefully help to make the Postie's walking and gestures look more natural.
Practice practice practice!

Trees minus the 'Sinister Windchimes"

Trees

Little sketch towards something spiderwick related :)

A Grave Business

Christian and I recently met up with Ben Read and Matt Gibbs to discuss this year's projects. Thankfully we were very productive and, among other things, named our imprint! We are now officially Improper Books. Ta-da!

We have a blog over at www.improperbooks.blogspot.com which will duplicate any IB related posts we put up on each of our individual blogs, plus extra updates on our goings on I expect. It'll be rather spacious for a while until we are way stuck in with the work, so expect some increased activity over there in the coming months.

We also completely replanned the running order of night post and added some much needed space to some aspects of the story.

Here's a slightly neater plan of the new graveyard layout (page 1 of a 3 page graveyard sequence).

The Night Postman

A few character designs for Night Post's only human :)

Spider

Warmed up yesterday morning by doing a quick sketch from The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black :)

I love these illustrations and there's a certain scene I have set in my mind to do my own version of :)

Nixie's Song

Realised while at work this weekend that Tony DiTerlizzi's first book in the Beyond the Spiderwick Chronicles series has a character in common with Night Post. Ok, his is technically a mermaid, but the image just seemed to tie in nicely with what i've been working on recently, Felt the need to share as his illustrations are amazing. Definately a future Friday Favourite :)

Painting the Night

Painting the night is very tricky.
I had a try with one of my sketchy panel plans.



I had a bash and this is what happened. The top one has bits in pencil and bits inked just because I was playing about a bit. Sort of tried one with just subdued colours, then one using mainly one colour to wash everything out in the way that night time so often does. Neither looked really night-like.

But the power of editing has helped somewhat.



The purple one I digitally inked afterwards which I rather like.

(yet again, colours coming up way bright on the mac :( which one is right? oooh that's a debate, pc or mac?)

We Hear You

My latest for marketing company IUVO, in time for their new website launch which is soon.
This one is for their page on focus groups.

Not exactly duck-weed-covered pond women! But I love drawing for a living :)

They are such a friendly company, I just love working with them.

The bird is a character which features in the little comic strips i've done for their other pages. Incase you were wondering. Probably not.