Developing A Concept by Russ Cox

© 2012 Russ Cox | Smiling Otis Studio

Happy New Year Everyone! For my first post of 2012, I thought I would share how I developed the concept for the above illustration. 

I started out with doodling in my sketchbook. The idea of a child swinging on an old branch was too symbolize "old and new" as well friendship.

After working up the sketch into a tighter drawing, the symbolism was not working and the tree branch became too scary. Especially when the end of the branch was turned into a gnarled hand. It seemed to be ready to grab the girl instead of forming an arch to show protection.

Since the sketch was not working, I decided to go back to doodling, trying to rework the concept or come up with something complete different. Sometimes it is best to step back and come from another angle. The idea was to make the illustration warmer in concept, so I thought what if she had a large oafish friend who would do anything for her. Maybe something happened to the tree where she had the swing and her friend was welling to pretend to be one to make sure she was happy. 

After roughing in the new layout, I noticed that I did not like the position of the rope over the girl's face. Plus the hand turned down had a negative feeling so I thought he needed his hand turned upward. Since he is pretending to be a tree, it was natural to put a bird's nest in his open hand.

I sketched out the new hand and girl which I dropped over top of the existing sketch. It saved me time redrawing the sketch for a third time since I would be doing a tighter version as my base for the final color illustration. I feathered the edges in Photoshop when I cut out the images so they overlapped the original sketch seamlessly.

The flowers were removed because they were a distraction from the interaction between the two characters. This is the final sketch which became the base of the final illustration which I rendered in Photoshop.

 In the final illustration, I wanted to mute the color palette so the warmth of their friendship shined through.

Having worked in Photoshop for the past 8 months, I think I am ready to tackle Painter so I may post the results next time.

Thanks for reading and following our glog.

Russ

Look for Debbie Ohi's always inspiring and insightful post next week

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The Remake of Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel by Russ Cox

Like Hazel's posting last week, I redid a classic children's book cover for the NESCBWI conference over the weekend. It was very difficult to choose a cover from the thousands of possibilities. After doing some searches on titles to jog my memory, I rediscovered the classic Mike Mulligan And His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton which I loved as a kid. Seeing the original cover after all of these years brought back many fond memories of the book. I thought the story was also a good fit for my style.
 

 
©2011 Russ Cox/Smiling Otis Studio

   ©2011 Russ Cox/Smiling Otis Studio

 What I am going to fiocus on this week is how I developed the cover concept. I start out with a few quick thumbnails to get some form of visuals and composition flowing. Since we had to deal with the book title, we had to incorporate that into the cover redesign.

 

  ©2011 Russ Cox/Smiling Otis Studio

 What I did next was to to take a thumbnail that I liked and do a larger rough. This helped me define placement of the objects while continuing the development the composition.

  ©2011 Russ Cox/Smiling Otis Studio

Originally I had Mary Anne facing to the right but I did not want the book title on the left of the page. I flipped the image and thought the overall layout had a friendlier look. Adding some of the modern equipment looking up at Mary Anne helped keep the focus on her face.

 ©2011 Russ Cox/Smiling Otis Studio

  Now that I had the composition to my liking, it was time to focus on developing and fine tuning the characters. As you could see in the the thumbnail stage, I had started thinking about Mary Anne's face during the process. I wanted to keep her antique and rustic looking with just a few touches of wear and tear but still happy to be working. She was the hardest to get just right since she is an iconic character and the focus of the book. Mike and the boy were a bit easier.

 

  ©2011 Russ Cox/Smiling Otis Studio

I like drawing the fine tuned elements separately so when I scan them in, I can move, resize, flip, etc. without having to redraw each time. This always saves me time but continuing the development the illustration. The above sketch was finally to my liking so it was brought into Adobe Illustrator and used as a template. I built the illustration in layers for easy editing and if I want to move things around.

 

   ©2011 Russ Cox/Smiling Otis Studio

This was the final piece.

Come back next week to see what the wonderful Debbie Ohi has created for you.

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