Family Basketball - cleanup

This illustration turned out better than I originally expected. I'm still going to go ahead and color it in Adobe Illustrator (which means that it'll have a bit of a simpler color scheme)...but only because I still want to submit it to the stock illustration sites...but to all of them, not just for the Dreamstime contest. Will it sell on them all? Who can say...but I'd like it to have the chance...

 that kid seems really excited about putting a ball in the hoop...

Basketball Time...the rough drawing.

This is another start to an illustration I'm doing for Dreamstime.  Their contest is family sports...so I have this one in the works, and a very rough version of a family playing tennis.  So once those three are done I'm going to sit back and not do any more illustrations for this particular contest.  My wife suggested I do a family MMA match, but I didn't think that would be a good usage of time.

As you might be able to see I had an easier time drawing the kid's head - the dad's head was a struggle (I ended up finishing it as a separate drawing in my sketchbook...and I just printed it out and will be adding a background and finishing the dad's head.

 

This is my second round of revisions after some illustrator clean-up.

Baseball time!

I did this illustration for Dreamstime and their monthly contest where photographers and illustrators compete for the best image.  The prizes are $300, $200, and $100 (for first, second and third, of course).  I went with a more painterly look with this one - usually i do an art piece in Adobe Illustrator (color and all) but decided to try a different approach.  This was a sketch that I did in Photoshop, then printed out and revised and then scanned back in and colored (in photoshop) directly on the scanned image.  It added a bunch of texture that I normally would have to fabricate myself.

I really like how the kid turned out, but I'm not so keen on the dad behind him.  I think there should have been more interaction between the two or something.  But I'm trying to stretch as an illustrator and draw more than just weirdly shaped animals and kids.  Gotta add some adults into the old portfolio...

IF: Slither...and baseball!

So I was working on an illustration for the new Dreamstime contest that started today.  Dreamstime is a stock illustration site that holds a contest every month (or so) where, just like Illustration Friday, they have a topic (this one is Family Sports)...and I started my illustration.  The only thing is that playing baseball has nothing to do with Illustration Friday's topic this week of slither...so I added a snake (that won't be appearing in my final dreamstime illustration).  And viola!  I can now post it to both contests!

of course this is just the rough - so it's not Dreamstime ready.  But I'm well on my way.

I sure hope someone does something with slytherin.  This week is just screaming for some harry potter posts!

IF: Early - wake up time

So I was directly inspired by IF.  Early wake up for the pup.  I guess it's a rather obvious one.  But I liked it.

Also - I was working on doing it a little different than usual - I drew it in photoshop and instead of taking it into illustrator to clean up (like I usually do) I colored directly on my rough and colored it completely in photoshop.  And I removed most of the lines (if not all of them).

 This is a slight revision of the piece - I changed the color of the walls to pop the character a bit more...and made the light coming through the sunroof a bit more transparent.

IF: Early Dog gets the honey

I've been working on this illustration for a couple of weeks now - originally I had walked across a bridge swarming with bees.  It just so happened to coincide with Illustration Friday's "Fearless" topic.  That got me to doodle my little dog character swatting at a bee hive - which, to me, is pretty fearless.  The next week (if you follow Illustration Friday as avidly as I do...which means, once a week...) then you saw that the topic was "equipment" and that almost made me cloth the dog character in a full bee farmer outfit (are they called bee farmers?).  Anyhow - this week's topic of early led me to the title of this piece:

The Early Dog Gets the Honey...

or stung.  It really could be that the early dog just gets stung.  Bees suck.

Bees - half way there...

There actually is still a lot to do, but I've finished with the drawing part (which includes too many rounds of revisions) and the color for the tree trunk and the little dog character....

But this is a part of what I have so far...(I still need to self color the lines as well, but I don't do that until the end when the color is set).

IF: Fearlessly facing down Bees

I always figured that if you didn't have many brain cells that you'd be okay with doing something like batting at a bee hive.  Everyone likes honey, but there's better ways to get some.

Now I've already posted a version of this - but that was my original thumbnail and illustrator cleanup.  Next in my process I print out the illustration (I either turn all the black lines into grey or make them 30% transparent which has the same effect) and then go back over it with my blue pencil.  I like this step because I always do very little detail to start with, and every time I attack the same illustration I add things to it, so the final one doesn't look so bad.  I just scanned this image and redid the clean-up in Adobe Illustrator:

And here's a close-up of the little dog character...

IF: Fearless

This drawing appealed to me as Bees are a weakness of mine.  So while I was waiting for someone to show up for lunch I drew a quick thumbnail of this:

And then cleaned it up.

I now have to revise it (I just printed it out) and re-clean it up.  And then it's on to color.  Hopefully I'll have it done soon enough to post this week while Fearless is still the topic of Illustration Friday!

Kids in occupations

The 3rd world countries have it right.  The kids aren't doing enough.  It's about time they stop listening to their ipods, or talking back to their parents - and started giving back...or at least earning their keep.  The most recent illustrations I've done for the microstock sites I'm affiliated with (Shutterstock, Istockphoto, Dreamstime, and Fotolia) deals with this problem by putting kids in jobs where they're needed and definitely qualified.  It doesn't take much learning to be a police officer or a doctor and it's terribly easy work...so why can't kids do the job?  Bring home a paycheck for mommy and daddy...that's a good kid.