Lots of drawing happening in my drawing room right now. Working on commissions (I know, I’m taking forever to get them all done) and a new illustration for Picture Book Report, which you’ll get to see in a week.
Archive
I had the pleasure of hosting two of my favorite people on this planet this past week: Vicki Nerino and Britt Wilson. They came down from Toronto and stayed at my place here in Syracuse. The three of us went and goofed off in New York City for a bit too. We spent a lot of our time here in Syracuse doodling!
While in New York City, we hung out with the amazing Scott C, doodled below. It’s impossible not to have fun while in Scott’s company.
We also spent a lot of time with Nathan Stapley. That dude is the best. We spent a day at the Natural History Museum with him.
Of course, we had dinosaurs and cavemen on our minds for the rest of the week…
Vicki and Britt returned to Canada late last night. It’s been such a fun week, I’m feeling sort of dazed right now. Very serious case of fun withdrawal. I’ve got lots of drawing to do though! And cleaning!
Using a series of very complicated scientific formulas, I’ve determined the three mini comic giveaway winners!
Congratulations! You’ve won! Please shoot me an email with your name and mailing address.
The rest of you: Better luck next time! Thanks to everyone that participated! Try not to take this too hard! I’d hate to see you moping around like this guy…
I made an epic post over on Picture Book Report this morning! I had two months worth of material to share, having missed my April posting date because of computer problems. It’s okay now though! I bought myself a new computer and holy smokes, it is wonderful. However! I’m now very, very poor. I mean I was pretty poor before, but the amount of money in my bank account is now frighteningly low. So before we continue on to the fun stuff in this post, I present you with a humble plea!
If you’re an art director, editor, publisher, or person who has the ability to hire illustrators: Consider hiring me to draw something for your project or publication? I’d really, really appreciate it!
Okay! Fun stuff! My Picture Book Report illustration for the month of April (up above) was a lot of fun to work on, though I definitely owe an enormous THANK YOU to my pal Vicki Nerino for her constant advice and input throughout the process. It wouldn’t have turned out as neat as it did without her help.
Something I don’t think I’ve mentioned anywhere is that I actually went down to New York in January to visit some friends. While I was down there I spent a day exploring the Met (where most of From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is set). I took a few hundreds pictures with my phone, planning to use them for reference later. It was great! I knew I’d want to do an illustration dealing with the bed they sleep in at some point but I wasn’t sure which bed it was that was actually described in the story. So I just took pictures of every bed I could find in the museum.
More recently I found this little article that E. L. Konigsburg actually wrote for the museum. The article reveals that the bed she describes in the book isn’t actually on display anymore! So I ended up basing the drawing more off of my own mental image of what she describes in the book and a few additional photos I found online of beds from the same time period.
Here are a few in-progress shots!
Here’s what the finished line work looked like before I painted it…
The one part I really struggled with (and where Vicki really helped me) was in deciding what direction I wanted to go in with the colors. I made a bunch of really awful digital color roughs but after getting some input from Vicki I did one more, using only blue.
After that it was just a matter of sitting down and painting!
For the month of May I decided to try something a little different. I knew right from that start that at some point I wanted to do a bunch of little spot illustrations rather than one big one. I was a little bit short on time this month and the next big illustration I have planned depicts a crucial moment in the story. I didn’t want to give that scene a rush treatment so I decided to do those spot illustrations this month.
Newspapers and I have a long history together. My dad has been a newspaper reporter as long as I’ve been alive. I was first exposed to comics thanks to newspapers. I interned in a newspaper art department for two consecutive summers when I was in college. I’ve just got an intense love for this form of media that is now, sadly, really struggling to stay alive. Anyways, this little drawing might not look like it was the most exciting thing to draw, but I enjoyed every moment of it. The headlines, which are intentionally obscured by the size of the image, are a mix of well researched and accurate to the year the book was written (1967) and completely made up and silly. I borrowed names from some of my pals for the bylines. Ryan Pequin, Meg Hunt, Britt Wilson: you’ve all written articles for the front page of this fictional incarnation of The New York Times. I used my dad, Mike McAndrew, for one of the articles too.
Check out the other two spots over at Picture Book Report!
Before I end this epic blog post, I want to remind everyone that I’m giving away the last few copies of my FERAL PIZZA mini comic! You’ve got until the end of the day tomorrow (Friday) to put your name in for a chance at winning!
I should also mention that I am in fact still working on commissions that people ordered a while back. I’ve understandably had a few people email me, wondering when they’ll get their drawing in the mail. I fell way behind on them as I was busy preparing for MoCCA and SPX over the last few months but I’m going to try very hard to work my way through the pile now that convention insanity is over with for me until the fall.
Thanks for reading!
Hello! I haven’t posted here in a few weeks and for that I apologize. TCAF was amazing! Thanks to everyone that came by and bought something, traded, or just said hi! It was perhaps the most fun I’ve had at an event yet. And I am a guy that tends to have fun at events!
I’d also like to thank the kind folks of Drawn!, specifically John Martz, for saying some very nice things about my work. Hello to any new readers that may have wandered over here as a result!
I’ve had a few people send emails, asking if I’ll be making my new Feral Pizza mini comic available to purchase online. Unfortunately, I’m almost out of them! I came home from TCAF with only a few left. I probably won’t be re-printing it until later this year when I do my second round of conventions (SPX and, hopefully, Canzine).
Rather than selling these last few copies to the highest bidders, I’m going to give them away! I’ll be pulling three names out of a hat. All you’ve got to do to get your name in the hat is comment on this very blog post! If you’re following this blog via livejournal or a reader of some sort, be sure to comment here on the actual blog. A week from today (Friday, May 28) I will pick three names out of a hat and announce the winners. Be sure to check back and see if you’ve been picked! And PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD!
Also, be sure to check in on Picture Book Report next Thursday! I’ll be sharing a bunch of neat stuff. Here’s a tiny peek…
I’ll be in Toronto this weekend to exhibit at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival! It’s my first time attending and I’m really excited (and I just love Toronto). I’ve been scrambling the past couple weeks to get a new mini comic done in time for the show and I’m happy to report that I printed them up this morning. Up above is another little peek at the new mini, which I’m calling FERAL PIZZA.
I recently answered some TCAF related questions for The National Post. You can read the whole thing here!
I apologize to anyone that’s sent email over the last couple days. I spent a great deal of time yesterday begging my computer to turn on. It never did. I then spent a great deal of time freaking out about how I’ve got a ton of stuff I need to get done this week and next week and I need a computer for all of it!
I’m currently visiting my parent’s house, mooching their computer to check email and… order a new computer. It should be here late tomorrow or the next day. Either way, I’m unfortunately going to be a little bit late with this month’s Picture Book Report illustration, which I was scheduled to share tomorrow. I apologize! I should still be able to get everything I’ve been working on for TCAF finished in time, though it might mean giving up sleep.
Just because I hate posting on this blog without any images, here’s a doodle from a few years ago!
Jeez Louis! I’m extremely busy right now. Here’s another peek at the mini comic that I’m scrambling to (hopefully) have ready for TCAF.
Hello there!
The MoCCA Fest was awesome. Best MoCCA I’ve been to yet. I had a blast talking to everyone. I got to spend some time with some of my good pals. It was a great weekend in every way.
I’m really excited right now though because I just found out that I’ve been added as an exhibitor at the Toronto Comic Arts Festival next month! I love Toronto and I love a ton of the people that are going to be there. In all my excitement I decided to try to get a new mini comic done for the show, which is just a short three weeks away (sneeky peek up above).
A new illustration! The plan is to use it as a new self-promo postcard. Hopefully it’ll bring in a few new clients! I’ve been going through an epic freelance drought. I posted fairly regular process updates to my twitter account as I was working on this illustration. A few people expressed interest, so I figured I’d collect all the process stuff here for you guys.
Before I get into the process stuff, I’ve got a quick announcement: I will be exhibiting at the MoCCA Festival this weekend (April 10 & 11) in NYC! Come find me at table E21 along with my pals Jess Fink, Eric Feurstein, L. Nichols, and Jorge Diaz. I’ll have mini comics, screen-printed shirts, original art and high fives.
On to the illustration process stuff!
My sketchbooks, for the most part, are filled with notes and scribbles much like this one. I don’t seem to sit and draw in my sketchbooks much these days. They’ve mostly just become a place for collecting and developing ideas. I scribble little thumbnails like what you see up above. Most of them never make it past the thumbnail stage but a few lucky ones (like this one) grow up to be big inky drawings.
Next we flesh the idea out a little bit. The characters transform from vague, ugly blobs to detailed ugly blobs. I really enjoy this phase simply because I really enjoy drawing. It’s just so much fun! I do this stage of the drawing on crappy printer paper because there’s no reason to do it on anything fancy.
I wasn’t super sure what I wanted to do with the background at first. In fact, I was really struggling with it for a few days. I decided to scan in the characters and print out a sheet of four thumbnails so that I could just doodle and figure the background out.
I’ve always focused more on characters and expressions in my work. Recently I’ve been making a conscious effort to really improve my background/scenery skills. I’m forcing myself to draw backgrounds as much as possible. You’ll see this in my upcoming Picture Book Report illustrations.
Once I settled on a background, I jumped into inking. I use a lightbox when inking. I’m not super picky about my inks or my pens. I use whatever ink I’ve got laying around and just use a cheap nib pen. I do the inking on Strathmore 140 lb. cold press watercolor paper.
The finished ink drawing! I like to augment some of my lines with a beat up old brush. If you look at the old guy’s sweater lines, they’ve got that fuzzy beat up old brush quality to them. I love that.
Before I get into painting, I often like to scan the inks in and play around with colors in Photoshop. I find it really helpful to digitally come up with a rough idea of what you want to do with the colors before attempting to paint. The final product won’t look exactly like your color rough, because that would just be nuts, but it’s really nice having something to shoot for.
I’ve started painting! I’ve just got some basic wash layers down at this point. haven’t touched that crazy carpet at all, haven’t done any shadows or anything. Just keep it nice and simple for a while!
This is a crummy phone picture I took while painting. At this point I’ve got most of that carpet done. Still haven’t gotten much into shadows or anything, but soon! We’ve hit the home stretch.
And eventually, we get here, to the finished illustration. Scan it in, fiddle with the levels a little (watercolors never scan well), and bang! Finished!
I hope you find this whole process peek at least a little bit interesting! I look forward to seeing everyone at the MoCCA Festival this weekend!
