This weekend was the almighty Society of Children’s Books Writers & Illustrators Annual East Coast Conference in NYC (SCBWIAECCNYC).  There was a whole lot of talent crammed into a tiny space, and it was pretty hard to not get excited about making stuff.  The big assignment for the illustration program on Friday was to do an illustration of Snow White’s birthday party.  So what would a bunch of dwarfs give a lovely lady?  A dwarf.  Obviously.

Here's where I started - with a sketch of a crazy old coot and a dwarf.

After that came a couple of stick figures thumbnail sketches, and then came the full sized drawing. The dwarf who volunteered to be wrapped is Fatty.

The finished painting.

This is probably the last post I’ll do on this piece for awhile – for a lot of reasons, but mainly because I don’t like it. The composition doesn’t work, and I’m too taken by my other projects to really care a lot about this one right now. So here are some character studies I did of some real sassy seagulls. If you live somewhere that’s landlocked and have never met one, seagulls fall somewhere on the International Sass Scale (ISS) between Theo Huxtable and Harriet Winslow. I do like these, so maybe after I finish the coonskin cap piece I can use them.

Time to do some character studies of Rock Mountain, the main man from the book I’m writing. This is almost exactly like the other sketch I already posted of him, but I did that one four years ago and wanted to make sure I still had him. This drawing is from the part of the story when a moose disproves Rock’s theory on quantum chromodynamics. It’s going to be a great book!

When I looked at my hunter sketch again, I realized I like that guy.

I played around with him more just to see what would happen, giving him some eyes and shaving his pushbroom, but neither of them worked. They both made him a lot more evil, like this sketch up above. If this guy jumped out of my sketchbook, ran out into the street, and got plowed over by a bus, I would probably kick him afterwards.

The second sketch is a more head-on look at the original hunter. I like the way the lady raccoon (raquette) peeks over from behind the cap. The subtlety works a lot better than the full-blown raccoon waving her rescuer down. Plus it’s a little more believable on the hunter’s part. But with the point of view from up in the branches, this doesn’t really work out well, and I run into a big ole problem. If I draw the cap with arms and legs, it’s just a raccoon curled up on a guy’s head, and it almost looks like she’s attacking him (picture A). But if I don’t show her limbs, it just looks like a head and an arm stuck onto a coonskin cap (picture ?).

I figured I would mess around a little bit with how the cap is positioned on his head, and how much of her face you would actually see. But in the end I realized, why look for pigs when you’ve got bacon on your plate? I really like the way she looks in the last hunter sketch, so what if I just use that point of view for the final piece?

So as you can see in this crude composition sketch that I made a four year old draw for me, the finish is now going to be a close-up of the hunter. But in the background you can see the raccoon reaching down to save his woman. Honest to gravy I think this one works a lot better than the other, especially since the point of humor is way more subtle than in the first draft. Subtlety is gold in these parts.

I’ve been working a lot on the hunter character for the coonskin cap picture, even though you’re not really going to see much of his face in the final piece. Sometimes it helps me to make up a background for a character to open doors for visuals and add nuances to the picture that make it more fun to look at. I’ve dived to the depths of his soul and have concluded that he is a stupid jerk. He’s a bully with a shotgun, and he shouts “hey, butthead” at his prey before he shoots at it – this usually scares it away before he can pull the trigger. He’s basically Biff from “Back to the Future,” but with sweatpants. If he can manage to back an animal against a tree, he’ll blow smoke in its face and slap its belly till it turns pink, then let it go to spread the word of his domination through the forest.

Here are a couple of rough studies of the hunter. The closeup definitely went a different way than I had in mind. I want him to be sinister and cause the mood to be tense, but I also want you to feel bad if he got hit by a bus. I think if I get rid of the ’stache and maybe show his eyes a little bit I could make him look a little less like Sgt. Slaughter. I hate Sgt. Slaughter.