15 March 2024

Cirru book series for children


Over the last 6 months or more I have been working with authors Danny and Melissa on a series of children's books featuring Cirru the travelling cloud. The books teach young children about colours, shapes and how to count to ten. I not only designed the books but did all the illustrations.

The books are available to buy on Amazon, so buy them and leave a good review, especially for the illustrations! 

Click the title to go to the Amazon page! 

Cirru Counts to Ten







09 March 2024

Animation: New ideas for my Nauti 2D character

 



I know a little more about designing a cartoon character and decided to redesign Nauti the character I experiments with 2D and hand drawn animation with a while back. This new character sheet could be helpful if I decide to use the more mainstream style of 2D using bones, puppet tools and computer assistant like MOHO which looks pretty enticing but I will need to somehow find about 500$ CAD or more. If I could get up to speed in Blender I could mix 2 and 3D as I have been doing here and there more efficiently and at no extra cost. Right now I am playing around with the idea of making the keyframes in Affinity Designer and hand drawing the inbetweens and see how that works. 

I was hoping Procreate Dreams would be further along in features to do this but I might need to stay with Toon Squid on the iPad. Krita has improved but not enough for what I need so far. Open Toons is s till a little frustrating to work with but might have the features I need. 

Below is the original design, it's very different in style. 


05 March 2024

Cartoon: Sheep (moutons)

 


More animals from Mobius Meadows farmstead. It was a bigger challenge than expected. This is the third iteration, the other two were... not good. mostly because I was too biased towards realism and couldn't seem to get my head around the cartoon part. In the end this came out OK. 

01 March 2024

Illustration: grange - Möbius Meadows Farmstead

 


The barn at my friend's farm in Vermont. I drew it when it was much smaller. The original barn was hanging off a steep hill and in bad shape. he had it moved to a safer spot and built a much bigger barn around it. This is in the style of my last few colour drawings done in Procreate with maybe a bit more painting detail than the rest. 

27 February 2024

Illustration: Carver Street, Provincetown, MA


 The last of these Provincetown drawings for a long while I think. I pass this house a lot from  where I stay to Commercial Street. I love the look but drawing it I saw there were a lot of signs of it having some maintenance issues. I didn't draw any of the trees etc around it to see more of the structure. 

26 February 2024

Illustration: Alpacas


 I have wanted to make cartoon versions of some of the animals on the farm in Vermont. Earlier attempts went... not so well. As I have been cartooning my heart out lately for a client I gave the alpacas another try and I think they came out ok. The sheep... not so much. I will need to rethink how I want to draw them.  Made with affinity Designer. 

23 February 2024

Illustration: Unitarian Universalist Meeting House of Provincetown

 


I hard a hard time seeing this place completely as there was always work being done on it when I was in Provincetown. It's set far back from the street and now has houses on either side and trees blocking a clear view as well. On my early morning walk on my last day I passed it and the trucks were gone! So I took a few reference photos and this is the result. Even with the workers gone, the right side was not really visible so I searched from old illustrations and photos from when the church was clearly visible. 

21 February 2024

3d Mock up to Illustration


 This is a part of an illustration for the children's book I am working on. Some of the panels have been very complicated and difficult to fit what the client wants into the frame and in the same perspective. I had been using Cinema 4D to make simple mock-ups to make the items fit in the frame and to keep the perspective consistent. Sadly, my C4D version no longer works on my OS and I started to learn Blender... again? Still?  In any case above is the finished illustration made in Affinity designer and I managed to make the mock-up in Blender  over a couple hours. Still don't know enough to do much but I made progress so that is a positive! 

The children's book looks basically like a cartoon and keeping all the images looking like they belong in the same book is not easy. 



17 February 2024

Illustration: Love N Happiness, Provincetown Massachusetts


 This was a different challenge. Doing the red on red on red paint job was what drew me to the building. I took away the power lines and other extraneous stuff from around the structure and then took away the little American flags and Xmas decorations I thought would ruin the cleaner look I wanted. 

12 February 2024

Illustration: Tower from Commercial St Beach, provincetown , MA

 


This is a common view in provincetown, I never tire of it. One thing I don't like is the wires, posts and other crap that blocks the details I like to see so i didn't drawn much of that. Still the details took quite a bit of time and I almost decided to keep this as line work. I have a couple more drawings to do from my December trip.