Dreamosaurs in Technicolor

It's not often that I feel compelled to do color work on my black and white drawings, but something about Dreamosaurs just called for some color play.  The original idea was to do a sepia tone over the full image just to add another layer of value, but once I got going on it I felt like a deep dreamy blue made more sense.  Photoshop makes it so easy to play with variations and layers of value.  The 'replace color' option is invaluable for me during this process, as I can drag the slider bars and see different palette options in real time without doing any permanent damage to the original.

All that said, I still have the itch to do a sepia version of some of my other black and whites.  In so many words, I'd like to push my illustrations a little further without making a jarring switch to full-color. Monochrome is just too beautiful to me!

Prints of these are available at my Etsy Art shop

As an aside and in the interest of scary children's media, I have to repost a quote by Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are) that my good friend and illustrator Aja Wells shared... 


"...from their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions, fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustration as best they can.  And it is through fantasy that children achieve catharsis.  It is the best means they have for taming Wild Things." - Maurice Sendak

Dreamosaurs / Dinos & Dogs

Norman Rockwell said "if it isn't working, put a dog in it."  After my menacing 'Tar Pits at La Brea' piece, I wanted to do something a bit less intense and generally more accessible.  There's definitely an interesting, different energy juxtaposing the massive menace of a T-Rex with the cute and cuddly west highland terrier.

At 18"x18", this is one of my bigger pen & ink efforts.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that, with 3 or 4 coats of gesso as a base, I can use my scraper tool much like I would on a claybord piece... pulling up ink to make corrections or value adjustments.  It takes more time on the front end to get the board prepped, but it certainly offers a versatile alternative to pre made scratchboards.

Pterodactdinner... yet another dinosaur drawing

Yet another dinosaur drawing... 8x10, pen on scratchboard.

A delectable dino dinner for drawing dorks like me, with color and 3d versions to follow. In fact, I have a feeling I will soon be starting an spin-off blog featuring my 3d drawings, which can for now be seen at AlbrightIllustration.com and facebook.com/albrightillustration.

Thanks, as always, for looking!

Drawing Process - 'Sabre Skull Valley'

 

Greetings! Today I'll to explain the process of developing my latest illustration--a prehistoric landscape on 12"x16" Claybord (Ampersand brand uninked scratchboard).  You can click any of these images to see them enlarged.

Most of this will look pretty rough and scrappy, and I guess that's kind of the point.  It takes a series of steps for me to reach the final state of what appears to be a controlled drawing.  Despite the mass of detail in the final image, I honestly don't have it all just sitting in my head ready to go.  It comes out of a lengthy process of continually refining the composition and values through a series of thumbnail drawings, rough full-size sketches, refined tracings of those sketches, and ultimately the clayboard itself.  

It sounds like a masochistic process when you think about how many times the image gets redrawn, but I've found it's actually the most reliable way for me to come to a final image that makes me happy.  So in that sense, I quite enjoy it!

I begin with a vague concept that I'd like to explore, in this case a dense prehistoric jungle with the key elements of a dragonfly and sabretooth tiger skull in the foreground with a volcano in the background.  These tiny sketches aren't meant to lock down any real detail, but simply explore different combinations of the elements in a composition that leads the eye around the page in an interesting way.

Once I have a thumbnail that I'm reasonably comfortable with, I'll cut a sheet of scrap paper to the size of my final board and do some rough sketching to explore my options.  Here I've used a light blue pencil to start, followed by a regular pencil to lock in some of the elements.  As you can see on the left image below, there's a lot of sloppy sketching going on where I'm trying different things and making intuitive compositional decisions.  

After the first rough starts to come together, I'll cut a second sheet of newsprint paper and lay it over the first on a lightbox, tracing and refining the shapes yet again.  At this point I'll still have areas that I'm not totally happy with, in which case I'll do my best to erase or just redraw over them.  You can see with the dragonfly that I'll sometimes use tracing paper to clean it up some or try variations without wearing through the paper.

I'll then do yet another tracing of the image on the lightbox to double check everything and form a template of the outlines.  This version get's laid down over the final board, sandwiching graphite transfer paper.  Using a ballpoint pen, I trace over the outlines, which leaves a light carbon copy on the clayboard that I can then finalize with micron technical pens (I prefer the 03 (.35mm) width).  

Here's an animation of the final board as it's outlined and then shaded.

I'm always singing the praises of Ampersand's Claybords, and yet again I have to say how much I enjoy working on them as opposed to paper.  Having the freedom to scratch away at the ink for texture or for corrections has truly liberated my process.  The flexibility to draw the values from light to dark, and then scratch them back again from dark to light has allowed me to literally sculpt my drawings until everything feels balanced.  It's removed the fear of going to dark and ruining hours of work, and made the whole process a lot more fun.

I've been working so much in black and white lately that my next experiment is to do a colored version of this to include in my portfolio.  Stay tuned for that, as well as a series of 3D illustration for your retro red/blue glasses!

Mastodon vs Sabre Tooth

Greetings!  Here's an 8x10 claybord... my first in fact!  It was inspired by the legendary metal band Mastodon, something that I'd been plotting for months before I finally got to work on.  I was originally going for vicious and violent, but as is typically the case, a bit of my cute and cuddly cartoon style crept in.  Regardless, I'm really happy with the movement in the composition and the consistent texture throughout.  This was really fun to work on and definitely kicked off my new claybord obsession!

To those of you who may have seen these already, I promise to start uploading NEW drawings as soon as I'm back in my apartment and have a scanner handy!