Saturday, February 27, 2010

From lively pencil to colourful art

I've not posted for a long time. My apologies. It's because I've been slaving away on designs I'm not allowed to show you. You probably thought I've been sitting on sunny riverbanks, dabbling my toes in the inviting waters while sunlight reflected from the ripples sends sparkling patterns across my face. This is England in February. Don't be daft!
Something I've been working on over the last few days is a series of illustrations for publication in the summer. One of the images provides an interesting comparison between the first scribble and the final piece.


I like the energy in this first pass. You can see how I was searching for the poses of the characters.











In the final piece, (well, almost final, it's not been approved by the client yet) while it might do the job required of it, I feel in converting it to vector artwork, it loses that lovely whooshy energy of the first sketch.

Even though the tiny pencil drawing is only 70mm wide, it's the one I'd rather hang on my wall. Maybe it's just me, but art produced via computer, no matter how incredible it is, will never have the same appeal to me as something produced by traditional means.