Holiday Card Sketches

Hi Again!

I am also working on a Christmas card design that includes all EIGHT of the client's pets. (The newest kitten has not yet been drawn.) Yep, home certainly is where the fur flies! Here are my sketches of the animals, plus I tooled around with colors and layout ideas. I'll show you the rest once I ink and paint the piece!

Modeled after the real fireplace in their home.

And some color compositions... 

 I personally like the last one best. The first one isn't bad! But it's up to the customer what they want on their card, so we shall see which style they pick!

Alrighty then, off to the next project...

Feelin' Sketchy!

Hullo Hullo!

Been SUPER busy working on multiple projects at once! With homework, and commissions, and Little Raindrop stuff, I haven't been staying on top of my blogging. But it's too late at night for my weary eyes to mix colors and such, so here's what I've been up to:

Little Raindrop, Ocean Habitat Sketching:

Little Raindrop, Chapter One Sketching:

And in my next post I'll share with you my Holiday Card commission! Yay! (See you in 5 minutes!)

Little Raindrop: Character Art

Hi there!

Today I focused on narrowing down Little Raindrop's character design. The author and I are deciding whether to use the big round eyes or the little oval pupil thingies for the final character. This was a good exercise for me anyhow, because it gave me the opportunity to explore LR's emotions, and I also found a great little animation blog that features some excellent character art.

So these were my original LR sketches:

And these are what I came up with today:

I'm sure you'll notice it took me a bit of time to loosen up, but I finally did and then that's when LR started to have a mind of his own! I'm also working on a few more characters that LR interacts with, but those aren't nearly as developed, simple as these characters are.

And I don't know if I'm just slow, or if this is normal, but those sheets of characters took me 3 hours! However, those hours are worth it for a solid character foundation. :)

Off to sketch some more! Ttfn!
~Melanie

PiBoIdMo!

Hi there!

I'm betting you might have noticed the new little badge in the upper left hand corner of my blog! :D

You haven't?
Well, that's a bummer...

Because it's almost time for Picture Book Idea Month! PiBoIdMo! When an artist comes up with a new picture book idea a day for 30 WHOLE DAYS!!! And 2011 marks my very first time participating, even though I have less time than ever to do pretty much anything. (But that's my fault- I'm an artist, not a day planner.)

So if you want to learn more about it, go here, (because there's no need to re-type the whole thing) and you might as well sign up while you're at it!

Welp, I've got raindrops to draw and homework to re-work, so I'll post ya later! ;D
~Mel