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Here’s sneak peek into the making of Dance Y’all Dance, a picture book written by Kelly Bennett that I illustrated and is being released this November (Bright Sky Press). It was the most fun project I’ve ever worked on. The story is set in the not too distant past when families, farm hands and cowboys & gals would get together on weekends at the local honky tonk. I did some research into clothing styles, period furniture, Texas symbols and olde timey dance halls, then chose to keep the colors vivid and saturated to give the book a contemporary look.
Once I had the scene sketched, I redrew it on Strathmore 10-ply paper with a Berol Prismacolor pencil…then laid a wash of ultramarine & yellow ochre. With a wet q-tip or small brush, I picked out highlights.
Using the new tones as a guide, I start to lay in color in gouache, working from dark to light. What interests me now is the design of shadows, losing and finding edges and letting a little of the wash show through as line. I make an effort to not have perfectly symmetrical faces as I believe it lends to more effective expressions.
I continue building layers of paint to emphasize form, adding texture, patterns, detail and highlights. Finally scanning into photoshop, I clean and fine tune the piece.
So there you have it. I love playing with color. I love visiting my works-in-progress (aka “children”) every morning. I love this job!
Working on: another country-themed book offering, but that’s all I’m gonna say right now! In the meantime, here is an interview I did on the author’s website, if’n you’re interested: http://www.kellybennett.com/books/danceyall.html
Remember the time you waited until no one was around, crawled under the Christmas tree, peeled back the corner wrapping of your present and took a peek? This is going to be something like that.
Except that this time, Mrs. Nicole Tugeau Claus is fully aware and gives a wink and a nod. I was asked to paint the image for this year’s Tugeau 2 holiday card. Knowing I wanted to show a variety of animals and convey the hope and magic of the season, I sketched and rendered the following illustration.
The next challenge was to create a piece of spot art for the back of the card that played off the main illustration. This is a fun part in creating narrative illustration…to give visual hints as to what may happen next. In this case, the subplot is easy to catch. A gift is given, it is received…and the mouse soars.
So if you receive one of these holiday cards in the mail, just act surprised. How did we know … it’s what you’ve always wanted!
currently painting: 6 illustrations for May/June 09 Ladybug Magazine
currently writing: short stories and poetry for a themed anthology
Happy Holidays!
Terri Murphy
People always ask me where ideas come from, for stories or illustrations. I usually give a variety of answers based in fact or fiction, but the real answer is ideas come from everywhere, and from nowhere. What makes an artist an artist, what gives them vision, is that they have trained themselves to investigate the nowhere to see and hear from all that surrounds them, to absorb it, and translate it back.
Suspense writer Stephen King, in his book “On Writing” says that ideas are constantly flying around in the sky, and it’s the writer’s responsibility to reach up and grab them. To illustrate that point further in terms of sketching characters to life, I had drawn a character called “Sister Cat” for one of my picturebook manuscripts about kid ghouls. Sister Cat is a sister to the main character, Velma the Vampire, although the biological conjuring of that relation is left a mystery. They are ghouls after all, and anything is possible. At first, Sister Cat looked like this…
Cute in pink, but a little too cat-like to be a real sister. So I waited for something to fly by..
Right before Valentines Day, during a break from the drawing board, I scanned a picture of a swan into photoshop, and did a little conjuring myself. The end result shown here is 2 swans forming a heart….and if you look long enough, a cat appears in the middle, a cat with wings. On Stephen King’s advice, I reached up and grabbed it…
And Sister Cat in action with Velma the Vampire…
Sister Cat came from nowhere, but there she was, staring at me all the while, waiting.
An aMUSEd vision…it doesn’t get better that that!
Terri Murphy
