Slow and Steady wins the race

The nice thing about working on a book is that every day I come into the studio, there's no question about what I should be working on.  With 20+ illustrations to do there's little to no downtime for me.

Being that there are so many pages to illustrate, I find that just taking things one image at a time is the best way to not get overwhelmed. 

The storyboard helps me keep the project in perspective.  When working on a series of images for one product, stylistic integrity is important.  Making sure the images do not evolve too much over time.  I've had to go back to older illustrations and bring them up to date with my new way of doing things, and sometimes the other way around. 

Some pics of the work place

This is M4, home of great people who are committed to making media that matters. 

 

This is Chris Jones, Owner of M4 and a great guy to work with.  Very passionate about what he does. 

 

Left we have Spenser and right Trey.  Spenser handles the video side of M4 and Trey handles the designing.  

 

Some Shots of the studio.

 

Some shots of the start of the book I've been working on.  Character sketches, stylistic explorations and an early storyboard.  

More Illustrating

Working on a children's book is a blast.  Every day when I come in, I get right to work.  Usually I have a meeting with project heads and art directors in the middle of the day, get feedback, and then it's right back to painting. 

Another Day at M4

I've still been doing lots of painting, getting illustrations ready for the children's book.  I've been doing most of my sketching on 13x19 pages with pencil.  After story boards are approved I gather my reference and start working digitally.  The main character of the book is representative of an actual person and we have a wealth of photographic reference of this character to work with. 

So far at M4

I've been working on a variety of things including recreating graphics for an employee handbook for a drilling company, creating storyboards for a short video segment at EFY and a childrens book, and illustrating images for a book.  There's been a lot of brain storming, a lot of sketching, and a lot of great results.  Taking sufficient time to sketch and plan is paying off. I am set up with two monitors and a windows based pc.  The entire staff has an adobe cloud account giving me access to whatever software I need.  So far I've been primarily using Photoshop, but I have used Illustrator and Indesign as well.  I've been able to use my brushes that I've become accustom to working with and the method in which I work has been relatively unaffected.  Being about to ask Trey, my supervisor about software specific commands has been extremely helpful, especially in areas I am less familiar with. 

Internship at M4

 

I've started an internship at M4 in Salt Lake City.  My primary responsibilities involve illustrating and story boarding.  My first major project will be illustrating a children's book, working closely with the author and art director. In a later post I will detail the fine people I'm working with.  Though much of what I work on will need to stay behind the scenes, I'll show what I can. 

Painting In Progress