Uninvited Guests

Thought I would take a break from posting about goblins and ogres and share a piece I did for a Scholastic Publishing short story featuring boogie monsters of a more mundane sort – head lice!

'How the Goblins Turned to Stone'

'How the Goblins Tunred to Stone' is a Dutch tale that describes how a village decides to eliminate the annoying goblins from their territory. The goblins remain invisible as long as they wear their caps but if the caps are removed, they are immediately evident. The villagers trick the goblins into a field and then prmptly knock their hats off by blindly waving their arms about a meter from the ground. The goblins start appearing and begin panicking. The villager spend the night chasing them down. You can read the story here.

Night scenes are always a challenge for me because I always stuggle to determine how much local color should be visible in a sea of blue or purple.

Tom Sawyer Sketches

These are sketches from a client project that, unfortunately, had to be cancelled. This was to be a condensation of Mark Twain's 'Tom Sawyer' fence painting scene presented for young readers.

Each illustration would have been on a separate page with wrapping text, rather than in the panel layout I've used for presentation.

The Three Little Pigs and the Ogre

'The Three Little Pigs and the Ogre' is one of those self-explanatory titles. The pigs are just trying to go into the forest to gather acorns but they keep being accosted by an ogre who, of course want to eat them. But the three porcines are too smart for the idiot ogre and keep outwitting him. And the story I linked to? Those are Howard Pyle's illustrations accompanying. Don't pay attention to him. He's a hack. Seriously, I wish I had half the talent he exhibited...

The post-modern me sometimes entertains thoughts that ogres in folk tales are not all that bad and simply suffer from being less attractive than the generally accepted norm. I also wonder what kind of home life they had growing up that resulted in them wandering around the countryside attempting to nosh on everyone they stumbled upon.

The Old Man with a Wart #2

This is the second image from 'The Old Man with a Wart' tale I posted about earlier. This is the part where the goblin king takes the old man's wart as guarantee that he will return and dance for them again.

The client asked that I make the wart look bad. Fairly awful, if you ask me.

The Quarrelsome Dragons

'The Quarrelsome Dragons' is from L. Frank Baum's 'The Tin Woodman of Oz.'

Woot, the Green Monkey, uses a magic apron to escape capture by a jaguar only to end up in a cavern filled with a family of argumentative dragons.

This is probably the most detailed piece so far in this project. Drawing dragon/lizard scales is a challenge and I was checking out all kinds of reference materials to keep things reasonably plausible.

Votive: iPad Painting

I've had my iPad since 2010 but I haven't taken the time to dig into the painting/drawing app available in the app store. To be quite honest, I've been lazy. I've grown so accustomed to Photoshop and my Wacom stylus that anything else was simply annoying and frustrating. So I put it off.

Anyhoo, I decied to sit down with my iPad, Sketchbook Pro, and a Pogo Sketch to see what happened if I stopped being pig-headed. I decided to start with the little votive holder on our coffe table. It took a while to get comfortable with the interface but it finally started to gel.

The shape is off but I'm not that displeased with it as a means to familiarize myself with what's possible with the iPad. As a child of Wacom, I spent the time cursing the lack of pressure sensitivity. But I did some research and found that Adonit is soon to release a Bluetooth-enabled pressure sensitive stylus with palm rejection. *Squeak*

I've found my next purchase.

Dragon Tease...

Here's a quick detail tease of the piece I'm working on right now...

The Nix in Mischief

Thought I would post something a little lighter in tone from my last post.

A nix is a shape-changing water spirit from German folklore. Generally, they are considered dangerous to humans much like the Sirens in Greek myth. The Irish have a version called a 'kelpie' which takes the form of a water horse. The Rheinmaiden fromWagner's 'Das Rheingold' are variations on the nix motif.

Since this project focuses mainly on stories for younger children, the author turned the nix into a rather comic character who wants to cause problems and so jumps into the bucket of a young girl gathering water from the stream. Not quite the dangerous water sprite that folklore warns us to avoid.

The Graeae

From the story of Perseus and his hunt for the Gorgon, Medusa, The Graeae are three blind old hags who share one tooth and one eye amongst themselves. Perseus goes to the Graeae to learn where to find Medusa but only manages to pry the information from the three sisters when he takes their eye and tooth. Lovely. You can read more about Perseus here.

I get to draw Medusa next.