Tonight I came out of the bedroom after putting Small Fry to sleep and I thought I really need to update my blog tonight... but sigh.... i have to be honest and say I just did not feel any real inspiration to write. But sometimes you have to shove the blahs aside and fake it so that one does not disappear into the ether in cyber space. One of the reasons I have not felt a whole lot of inspiration is because I am just slammed with work right now. It happens every summer so I'm not complaining (what with my habit of needing to eat) but I'm finally in the home stretch of the projects I'm working on. One of the projects I did this year was a lift-the-flap book. I think I mentioned this in an earlier post. I've never done a flip book before and I have to say this thing was excruciating. It was quite a challenge to get each side of the flap lined up with the underlying illustration. At one point Jim Dear pointed that he knew I was spinning my wheels with it because I was "looking in the mirror and sighing a lot" (I have a mirror over my drawing table that lets me see work at a distance without having to get back away from it). I told him that doing with was like having to paint the illustrations 3 times, but exactly the same each time!
Anyway I'll post a few pieces from it here. Unfortunately I don't have a cool way to show how the flap works so these are just the underlying illustrations that make up the main page.
These are the main characters in the book. Its a story about twins, Jack and Tracy, that live on a sheep ranch in Australia.
This was about how Tracy like to play with the baby lambs. It was quite interesting trying to match up my hay texture.
On top of the flaps this book presented two new challenges: drawing sheep being sheared and a weaving loom. I had to do quite a bit of research to see what goes into both processes. This is from the sheep shearing page, the ranch hands are cleaning up afterwards.
The last page, I was just kind of proud of this lighting effect.
Later this month I have to do give a talk to a women's group about "what I do" so I think I may take these illos and the sketches for them to show as this project was definitely different than the usual stuff I work on day in and day out.
1 comment:
Wow these are really wonderful! So perfect!
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