Here’s the image I created for this year’s Bard in the Barracks production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Nothing flexes your drawing muscles like drawing from life. I don’t get to do it often, but when I do I really enjoy it.

Here are a few life drawings I did recently during an evening class at the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design.

I was using a black ballpoint pen and Copic markers.

Here’s the description from the JackPine website:

“A Long Day Inside the Buildings is the story of an elementary school teacher struggling to be true to his students and teach them about a world that increasingly baffles and belittles him.”

It’s an extremely surreal story and I was excited about the idea of providing illustrations that echoed the same kind of feeling Sean’s writing created.

The idea of the surreal and the setting in the elementary school were my inspiration. I remembered educational books from when I was a kid like the How and Why Wonder Book and the Golden Book Encyclopledia. the Golden Book Encyclopledia had several volumes, each one dedicated to words beginning with letters in a certain range of the alphabet, like “Aardvark to Army.” They had these beautiful covers by Cornelius De Witt featuring combinations of incongruous objects, all of which began with letters in the alphabetical range of the book. This incongruity put me in mind of that line the surrealists loved so much “the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”

So I decided I’d create illustrations for a volume of an imaginary children’s encyclopedia, a dream encyclopedia. I wanted it to seem familiar at a glance but mysterious on close examination.

I painted the front and back cover illustrations in acrylic on watercolour paper and the interior illustrations are pencil with washes of India ink.

Here are a few images from the book:

Front Cover

Back Cover

Title Page

Cavern

Strange Fish

The Tarot

It’s a 3D modeling program which is extremely intuitive. It’s based on the idea of actually making things by drawing lines, so people who are comfortable with pencil and paper won’t find a sharp learning curve. Like any good graphics program, although it is easy to use, there is also a great deal of depth. You can do extremely complex things with Sketchup.

You can quickly and easily build something straight out of your imagination but you can also create 3D buildings or objects from 2D photos.

Once you’ve built your model you can use it for anything you like. Take a shot of it from any angle, change the field of view, etc. You can add textures and colours as well as pre-made elements like windows or trees. 

You can print it out and use the squaring up method to transfer it to a drawing surface and incorporate it into your drawing or painting. Or make a loose sketch from the image on the screen. For digital work, of course you can export images and import them into Photoshop. You can even create your own perspective grids.

The thing that’s really great about Sketchup is that it’s FREE. Yes, free. There’s a professional version which does come with a price tag but it is astounding what you can do with the free version. It’s made by Google and I think they have some sort of internet search engine as well.

Here are some images of buildings I’ve constructed in Sketchup for upcoming projects:

The second sketch is my wife and son playing in the water.

I recently finished this illustration for the 2009 NotaBle Acts Theatre Festival poster.

I painted in the ground more decisively and painted the large trees in the middle-distance.

On a new layer, I painted the trees in the far distance. These trees are being lit by the moon and not by the spotlight in the foreground. They get brighter and more bluish as they recede into the distance because of this lighting and because of aerial perspective.

I also painted the cast shadows from the figures onto the ground.

Titania’s tattoos were created in Illustrator and imported to Photoshop on another layer. I moved them around and placed them where I wanted them.

Then I changed the layer’s opacity to 60% so they would blend in to the skin a bit.

Finally, I made some adjustments to the image to brighten it up. I changed brightness, contrast and selective colour to get it where I wanted it. Here you can see the “before” image on the left and the “after” image on the right.

Next I copied the sketch and put it on a new layer above the base colour. While I’m working, I paint on layers over the original sketch. I keep this sketch copy above the painting layers and use it to check and make sure everything is where it should be. I usually turn the visibility of this layer off except to make periodic checks.

OK, on to painting. I painted the sky lighter at bottom and darker toward the top. Now I could think of the base colour as being the ground.

Then on a new layer, I started to colour in the sketch like I was colouring in a colouring-book. Flat colour, filling in shapes.

Then I checked to make sure all my shapes are in the right place by turning on the sketch copy layer. I could also see where to go next. The sketch is like a map.

I decided to start giving some depth to the picture by painting the ground. At this point, it was necessary to make lighting choices. This scene takes place at night and although the moon is out, Titania and Bottom are deep in the dark woods so the moon doesn’t provide the light. One of the challenges of this illustration was to clearly represent the characters in the darkness of night. I also wanted Titania and Bottom to be of central importance in the illustration (rather than the moon or anything else). I decided to light the two figures with a soft spotlight. So, there’s a bright spot around the figures and the ground becomes darker as it recedes into the distance.

With the direction of lighting established (the light is coming from above and to the left), it was time to start painting shadows on the forms of the figures. I began with the skin of the fairies. Keeping it simple, I focused on 3 areas: highlight, mid-tone, and shadow. The base colour of skin that I had already painted served as the mid-tone. So, I painted the shadows and highlights with the light source always in mind. I also painted to fairies’ hair.

I moved on to clothing next: the fairies’ leaf clothing and Bottom’s wrinkly jeans.

In the next post: more painting.

I added the more detailed sketch of Titania and Bottom on top. Then I cut out the fairy actors and moved them around, resizing them until I was happy with them.

I also cut out the arm and head of Titania from my photo and placed them on top.

Then I started sketching on a layer above these elements. I blocked in the main forms I wanted to use in the background. I refined the figures of Titania and Bottom. Based on information about the actual costumes the actors would be wearing in the play, I gave Titania a sort of crown made of sticks. I also changed my mind about fairy placement.

I added bodies and wings for the fairies and added a few background details.

This was the final drawing I used to paint the image from. In the next post I’ll talk about the painting process.

This illustration was for the Bard in the Barracks production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to be used in their promotional material. It was painted digitally.

The first step in the production was to work out some thumbnail compositions to figure out how it would look and what to represent.

Here are a few:

I settled on a composition with Titania and Bottom in the foreground and Oberon and Puck in the background having a good laugh.

Next I started making some sketches to figure out what the characters would look like.

On these pages I was working on Puck mostly although Bottom is also there:

Here’s my conception of Oberon:

Titania and Bottom:

Finally I decided to include Titania’s fairy helpers and not to put Puck and Oberon in.

This production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is to be performed outside in a park. I went with Len Falkenstein, the show’s director to visit the site and took a few pictures. Here’s the one I used:

Len also allowed me to come to a rehearsal and take some pictures of the actors.

In the next post I’ll talk about how I put these elements together.