I'm heavy into the sketches for my next book - Santa Pups written by Jerry Pollatta - published by Scholastic. It's a super funny picturebook about Santa and dogs. Many of you know how much I love dogs (sorry cats - the dogs talked me into joining their team) so I jumped at the chance to work on this one! I'm even going to be able to work in my dog Pooch into a few scenes!
There's a lot of action in this book so I've been approaching the sketches a little differently. Rather than working up from a strict thumbnail on every illustration I started with rough thumbnail sketches but then I'm moving directly to objects on layers in Photoshop. This will give me lots of flexibility with perspective and scale. So I've drawn a lot of "parts" so I can mix, match, move, distort, rotate, scale, etc.
After I move all the object into place I'll send the flattened image back to my iPad for a clean up and then off to my editor for final approval before going back to Photoshop for value and color.
I love your sketches and not for the reasons most might assume. They are amazing. But I love seeing the process. They are reassuring. If I need to make 100 of the same sketch, ok, so be it. Seeing your sketches reminds me that sometimes is takes more than 10, 50, 100 and then some. Thanks, Will. : )
ReplyDeleteThank you! I love the spontaneity of sketches and I realize I don't share them enough...some of my warm up sketches are really bad - I think you have to get your brain to say, "we know how to do this so let's start following the steps!"
DeleteSo interesting. I just love your blog. Thanks so much.
ReplyDeleteThank you Melissa :)
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ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this very helpful and reassuring post. I do have a question about reference photos. Did you use any for these sketches?
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