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Saturday, December 25, 2010

Comic Strip Wrap (Christmas Wrapping Part 5)

This is the last major wrap-gimmick for me this year: A pile of gifts turned into a comic strip. First, here's the comic strip. I drew it for a couple of friends of mine who love Christmas, comics, cartoons and other fun stuff. Specifically, I turned them into cute little comic strip characters and wrote a Christmas gag around them. Fun, right? Below are the work-in-progress steps for both the comic strip and the wrapping paper gimmick.



1) First step is the pencil sketch, as usual. This one's pretty loose because Christmas was approaching and I didn't have time to do a finished, polished sketch the way I normally like to do. So the inking was done on the fly over some very rough doodles. Some panels (like the final) were pretty involved, so I made sure to tweak the sketch a bit before inking.

2) The inking was done in Photoshop. I was aiming for a very sweet, kid-friendly feel for the piece. So the lines are bold and bouncy. I did the lettering and word bubbles in Illustrator and imported them before step three.

3) Knowing I wanted this to end up looking like an old Sunday comic, I Paint-bucketed some desaturated colors and kept things simple.

4) After the color was in, I aged the entire piece by throwing a lot of off-yellow onto the piece. This way it looks like newsprint that's been sitting in your attic since 1979. The final step (which can be seen at the top of this post) is adding the half-tone texture to the illustration for that old printing press feeling. Now, on to the gifts.



1) I started by laying out the gifts I planned to give my friends in some semblance of a grid. Noting the size and shape of the gifts, I wrote the comic around that. Probably not the easiest way to write a comic, but I had an idea and I made it fit.

2) While I was busy writing and drawing the gag in my computer, I also began wrapping the gifts. I used this yellow, newsprint-type paper to give the comic an aged feel.

3) Once the comic was done, I used the packages to size the panels, printed out the line work, carefully cut out the panels and glued them on seamlessly. When they were finished, the packages looked like they were wrapped in paper with a comic strip printed on it. Since it's Christmas morning I can tell you it went over big. As I always hope, my friends had an agonizing time deciding whether or not to open the gifts and risk ruining the comic. After watching them meticulously cut through each gift's paper carefully with a pocket knife, I then rendered their efforts virtually pointless by handing them the full color comic, matted and framed. Merry Christmas. -v

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Turning Someone Into A Peanut (Christmas Wrapping Part 4)

Nothing like the Sunday Funnies with Linus and his good friend...Daryl? Here's the deal: a few years ago, as a Christmas gift, I drew good ol' Daryl into a Peanuts illustration. She loved it. So, since then, I've drawn her into a number of scenes and comics as a little Peanuts character. This year the illustration also ends up as box art on a gift from another friend: hand-felted art dolls of Linus and Daryl from runredrun. Follow along, won't you, and see all the steps it took to complete this multi-level Christmas gift.



1) First, a look back at some of the other Peanuts art I did featuring the gang's new friend, "Daryl." This first one is, of course, the skating scene at the opening of the Charlie Brown Christmas special.

2) This is another Christmasy image of Charlie Brown, Daryl and Linus hanging out at the wall. I tried to match the look of watercolor backgrounds with hand-painted cels of the characters on top, but it's all done digitally.

3) When my friend at runredrun told me she was making Linus and Daryl dolls based on my old Schulz send-ups, I knew I needed to create a new image that would work as both a framed illustration and as box art for the dolls. So I proportioned a new sketch for both purposes and started with the pencils. The pencils relied heavily on Sunday comic compositions by Charles Schulz. As usual I wanted to make it as authentic as possible. So I pored through old Peanuts collections to find just the right neighborhood scene. And, of course, the Daryl character is basically a Peanuts girl in a blonde wig. You just don't mess with good design.



4) So the next step was inking the pencils. I did it digitally in Photoshop, but tried to use that same loose, sometimes shaky inking style that Schulz was known for. Again, authenticity is the key.

5) I continued aping the Peanuts look by picking colors found in the actual comics -- or close to them, anyway. I liked it, but I thought giving it that roughed-up, newspaper look would give it a warmer feel.

6) So I aged it. I used the halftone screen filter for all the colors, giving it that old printing press feel. And, to complete that effect, I knocked the colors off-register to fake the look of printing plates slipping during the press process. Now onto the "wrapping" part of this project.



7) As I said before, I set this project up so that it could be used as a printed illustration and box packaging. So I placed the box package template over the illustration in order to see where my text would go.

8) Finding a font online that mimicked Charles Schulz' unique lettering was fairly easy. So I downloaded it and created the masthead for the doll packaging.

9) Finally, here are the dolls, standing near their packaging. I love the look of these dolls and the way the label turned out. These will be a great surprise for Daryl come Christmas morning (as long as she stays off my blog until then).


For more shots of the finished dolls as well as some work-in-progress shots, you can read a fun and informative post over at runredrun. Happy Holidays! -v

Monday, December 20, 2010

Scavenger Hunt Robot (Christmas Wrapping Part 3)

Ok, here's a bit of fun. My friend who likes robots is getting this put-it-together-yourself paper robot from me for Christmas. But the robot isn't the gift, really. The robot will be scattered in secret locations around his house, each piece containing instructions on where to find the next piece. The third and final piece of the robot will tell him where to find his actual gift. And on the slim chance that he actually reads this post, I can't reveal what the gift is (though it'll probably be some kind of robot). Work-in-progress steps below.



1) this was the rough sketch of the robot, which I then scanned and placed in Illustrator.

2) After tracing my sketch in Illustrator with the Pen tool, I colored it, printed it and cut it out.

3) Here's the leg support piece, cryptically inscribed with instructions to find the torso.

4) And, finally, here is the horrible cell-phone photo of the assembled robot.


After he finds his actual gift, he can spend the next few minutes assembling his paper robot and marveling at how clever his friend is. -v

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Clumsy Grandma (Christmas Wrapping Part 2)

I'm not a monster. I don't think it's hilarious when old ladies slip on the ice...in general.


But I have a friend -- we'll call him Greg -- and Greg has a mother with the unfortunate habit of falling at the most inopportune times in the most inopportune places. Like in hotel lobbies on the first day of a family vacation. Or leaving funerals.


There was one recent Sunday morning Greg went outside to find his porch covered in donuts, the front of his house splashed with coffee and his mother's feet sticking out from behind his shrubs. She'd gone to the bakery before visiting and somehow slipped off the stoop while waiting for Greg to answer the door. Don't worry, she wasn't hurt. The thing is, she's fairly resilient. No major injuries, really. But someone really ought to teach her how to use her feet.


This Christmas card is my way of gently poking fun at my friend who will undoubtedly be picking his mother up off the ground sometime this holiday season. I'd like to think it'll occupy an honored place on his mantle. Let's just hope his Mom doesn't see it.


Work-In-Progress below from sketch, to inks, to color. Enjoy the holidays and remain upright. -v

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Goofy Santa (Christmas Wrapping Part 1)

Every year, despite having a ton of other actual work to do, I find myself wasting precious hours trying to cover up my poor gift wrapping skills with some sort of artsy camouflage (see Batman/Joker/Bigfoot wrapping from a friend's birthday last year).


So, first up this year, is a very simple Goofy Santa Christmas card for a friend who loves Disney. It's really just a little colored pencil sketch, but I needed to post something this week so I figured I'd throw the work-in-progress steps on the ol' blog.



Step 1: I have this old, mealy, yellow paper in a drawer in my studio that's perfect for making things look aged. I'm not even sure how old this paper is. I think it came with the studio. So I drew Goofy in a Santa hat and started in with the Prismacolor pencils.

Step 2 & 3: It's really just layering in color on top of color, very simple stuff. I wanted to capture as much of the paper texture as possible so I used a very light hand.

Step 4: The paper looks old, yeah, but I needed it to look a little more vintage. Not having the option of tea-staining it at this point, I just followed some of the folds in the paper with some sienna and ochre pencils. Now it looks warm and toasty. In the end, I decided the composition was horrible (big blank space, bottom right) so I threw a border around the thing and dropped the classic sprig of holly in the corner. The best part about this card is that, thanks to the paper, it feels like it's going to fall apart in your hands. So fragile. It'll be a Christmas miracle if it makes it through the mail. -v

Monday, December 6, 2010

Holiday Depression, One Step At A Time

I'm not sure why people get depressed around the holidays, but I suspect it has something to do with feeling guilty about not getting me enough presents. So cheer yourself up this year and buy me something cool. And while you're planning your Christmas shopping, I'll take you through my process for this very sad image of a very sad girl.



This is my progression of roughs. I wanted an image of a sad girl, so I tried a few different scenarios: sad girl in her car, sad girl in an elevator, sad girl at her desk, sad girl in a coffee shop. I basically just followed this melancholy woman through her miserable day, trying to pinpoint just the right moment of sorrow. Nothing really worked until I doodled the sad girl on her couch, hugging her teddy bear after an unbearably dismal day at work. Great. I love it. Now on to the painting.



1) The first step is tightening up the rough doodle into a workable sketch.

2) I wanted a soft, feminine feel for this piece, so I filled the background with a gentle pink. It's a bit cliche, but sometimes the old conventions work the best.

3) In Photoshop, with a rough brush, I start adding in both texture and lighting to the background to add visual interest and to focus attention on the girl.

4) Again, sticking to soft, pastel colors, I block in a cool, minty green for the couch to contrast with the warm pinkish/purple of the background.



5) Still using the sketch as my map, I add in some flat colors for the girl, bear, tissues and ice cream carton.

6) After the base colors are painted, I model the figures and objects with highlights and shadow. After staring at the piece for this long, I begin to empathize with the girl and start feeling really depressed. So I dial up some smooth jazz on iTunes and make it much worse.

7) I paint in the cloud and raindrops using the sketch as a reference. Just some darker blues and desaturated reds to make it look kind of ominous.

8) I lose the pencil sketch and play around with different cropping options. I also decide the cloud is hanging too high above her head and bring it down. Last thing I do before cropping it is throw in some noise and, basically, I'm done. She looks miserable and I couldn't be happier. -v