Anatomy Lessons from the Great Masters is the first art book I ever owned. My dad bought it for me at the Palette Shop, when they were in the first floor suite of the white building that marks the entrance to the 3rd Ward in Milwaukee. This book and How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way were side-by-side on my drawing table for a long time as a pre-teen.

Stupidly, in a fit of “moving fever” I gave that first copy away. I recently purchased it again because I realized that I had all of those images memorized from poring over it as a kid and I kept recognizing them in other art books.

Sadly, the Palette Shop is no more. I believe they hunkered down as the in-school art store for MIAD for a while, but an internet search shows that it looks like Utrecht now has wormed its way in there. Le Sigh.

So here’s the final artwork on the Deadly Love mock-cover assignment. Let me know what you think. This is gouache and watercolor on Annigoni paper.

So the final composition winner was this one, a odd down-angle on the protagonist and her Mr. Not-So-Right, and the man holding is hand behind his back to reveal to us his bloody shirt cuff. Uh-oh! This is where people start screaming at the screen telling her to run.

Anyway, this is the final drawing, done from some photo reference and a background mockup I did in Google SketchUp. What a great little program for Google to give away for free.

I also want to thank Kate Seidman of The Art Room Boutique and Paul Cary Goldberg for the wonderful opening on Snuday. We had quite a crowd for a cold February Sunday afternoon, and there were several times where the little store was packed to capacity. Thanks to all who came out!

This is a book cover piece. It’s a mock assignment on the Cennini Forum. Here’s the synopsis of the imaginary novel:  “set in an urban setting, Lucy is unaware that danger stalks her. A serial killer is on the loose and she is his next target. But her attentions are elsewhere since she met Charles. After only two weeks, the normally skeptical Lucy has been swept up in a love affair she’s only dreamed of. Charles is attentive, bright, handsome and…well, he’s perfect. Perhaps a little too perfect. This Hitchcockian thriller moves at a breath-taking pace with unexpected twists at every turn as a mysterious McGuffin falls into her lap, driving the story forward to it’s final surprise ending.”

So you can see it’s good fun. The above is my sheet of 32 compositional sketches, done in pencil with a little red tossed in for design considerations. I’ll show the final design tomorrow.

Here’s the color piece of the James Herriot cover. (See yesterday’s post.)

I wanted to get a bit of nostalgia in the piece, which I did by spotting blacks with a brush pen and then washing the whole thing with brownish orange to start, and finally layering colors over that. I like to work with ink, watercolor washes, and gouache where needed for opacity. I think it adds a lot of depth to the surface of the piece that sometimes is lacking in water-media pieces. I really like some of the effects you can only get with watercolors, like the graininess of the washes in the sky where the blue bleeds into the orange.

I also cropped a bit of the sky out to give it a more intimate feel. Books like this are often use photos for the covers, which can be nice, but rarely would they stage a photo as intimate to the content of the book as this illustration is.

More tomorrow.

I’m producing some pieces for my llustration portfolio again, getting ready for another mailing to art directors. This time, I’ve kind of split the difference between editorial illustrations and book covers. This drawing is the basis of a cover for the first book in James Herriot’s series, All Creatures Great and Small. In the books, he always describes stopping along a roadside on a hill for lunch and looking out over the beautiful dales of Yorkshire. So I tried to capture that feeling in this piece. Today drawing, tomorrow, color.