Well, maybe not ’showers’, but a good start to the month with four book covers coming in at once. Luckily they don’t all have to be finished in the next few weeks.

I’ve started working a little differently this time, with black and white roughs that I’ll convert over to colour roughs and then finish off with high polish. I usually bash around with colour and then play with the tonal range to pin down the image, but this way allows me to get the ‘flow’ of the image first, and then to manipulate the colours to suit. It’s also a way to stop overburdening the colour range of the image, I believe. Let’s see if the experiment works. Once I have this techniqued down, I might try selecting a strict colour palette before I start even drawing up the roughs, and not moving out from that palette. That’d be a hard task, I think, because colours are something of a weakness for me, I believe. I’ll try for mood with colour. But first let’s see how I go with the black and white stuff.

Cheers
Les

March has almost gone with only one image uploaded but a lot going on in the background. The most important was the completion of the CSFG cookbook and I hope to release the caricatures to the main site fairly soon. Also happening in the background is a change of studio, with all the packing, sorting and unpacking that goes with it. Not a pleasant thing, but I did find some old photographs that I thought lost so can use them as source material.

This month I have tried to free up a lot of my brush stroke and work as loose as possible. You’d be surprised how hard that is, especially when working digitally, ‘cause there’s so much ’support’ happening by the software and you have to break out of the whole ‘push-button-get-effect’ cycle. You have to use the tablet and basic brushes and just go a bit wild. Hopefully it’s working.

Other than artwork, this site is getting some interference from online gumblin sytes and they leave unwanted comments on these posts. Don’t know what to do about them other than try to monitor them. If anyone knows a trick or two to get around it, I’d be interested to hear it.

So, till April hits us, I’ll sign off. I have a studio to put back together and some work to get finished.
Cheers
Les