Monster Island - Bird's Eye View, inked

Here's the next step in completing the final art of the Monster Island bird's-eye view spread for my new kids' book, Monster Safari. I inked the line of the halftone drawing (see below) using a Micron Pigma number 005 pen. I used a number 2 for the hand-lettering. I left the half-tone in so that it would serve as a guide when I'm painting in the color values and shadows.

The next and final step, the color, will be done in Photoshop, using my Wacom Cintiq. I will be posting the final color art soon.

Check out my other blog, the Trowbridge Chronicles.

Merry Christmas to All!

Here's the pencil layout and final art for this year's Christmas card. Best wishes for a Merry Christmas to all and a Happy New Year.

Monster Island - Birds-eye View

This will be the first spread in my Monster Safari kids' book. This illustration will introduce readers to Monster Island from an aerial point of view. This is a graphite value study of the upcoming full-color spread. The next page in the book may contain a straight-down view, an illustrated map of the island, which will pinpoint exactly where our team encountered the various monsters on the island. Click on the image to enlarge it.

I hand-lettered the above text, but I might decide to typeset it. All of the monster pages (scroll down) are hand-lettered, but I might find that it would be more appropriate to typeset the introductory pages.

The next view that you will see of the above illustration will be the final full-color version. 

Have you seen my other blog, The Trowbridge Chronicles? It's a world away from Monster Island.

Two-Headed Zilch - How-to-Draw Page

               

The last beastie in our bestiary sketch book is perhaps the strangest, and certainly the rarest. We only saw one specimen of the Two-Headed Zilch during our time on the island. It was probably an anomaly, a one-of-a-kind creature. 

Watching the Zilch walk through the jungle was a hysterically funny sight. We had to stifle our guffaws so as not to scare him away. When one side of the Zilch is walking forward, the other side is backing up. What was most hilarious was watching them squabbled over who would walk forward. Whoever lost the argument was saddled with the inferior task of backing up as they lumbered through the jungle in search of food. I was sketching furiously while I laughed silently. 

They would begin with a back-and-forth struggle...forward, backward, forward, backward, and so on...until one would win the tug-of-war. He was then the leader, for the moment, until they would stop to nibble on a jungle morsel, then it would start all over again. 

You can see that there's a small space on each side of the creature where a talk balloon could be placed. But I'm in a bit of a quandary about what the creature will be saying. I'm open for suggestions for a very short bit of dialogue that would go in the talk balloon...one bit of dialogue from each side of the creature. If I'm able to use your suggested dialogue, I'll send you a signed copy of the book when it comes out.  

Now that all of the creatures are drawn, I will begin the final phase of the book, creating the full-color set-up illustrations and text, using the many reference sketches and photos that I took while I was on the island. The next image you see may be a bird's-eye view painting of the island and surrounding tropical sea. I have only a handful of pages to go before the book is complete. If you want to see all of the monsters in the book, simply scroll down.

In the foreground you can see the hint of a game trail which leads to a thick, dark and mysterious region of jungle, with a sharp peak in the distance. We called this peak the "Needle" for its sharp point (which we scaled later that day). It was in this dark jungle undergrowth on Monster Island that we spotted the Zilch.

Have you seen my other blog, The Trowbridge Chronicles? Check it out.