This is Peanut Bear, who was comissioned by one of my first clients after I went into full-time freelance illustration. He was intended to be the mascot for a children’s toy and sporting goods website. Has anyone ever seen it before? I make it a point never to share my work online  until the client has used it. But after four or five years, I figure I’m safe.

The project went through many differnt sketches before I landed on the one they were happy with. Here are a few of my favorites. (Please note that these are only a portion of the 14 sketches I showed the client, and that doesn’t include the myriad of sketches I discarded and never showed anyone).   

From all the different bears drawn and the sports presented, it’s clear that the client wasn’t quite sure what they were looking for when the process began. And I hadn’t yet learned the skill to read between the lines and determine what the client really expects. I imagine that if the process was done all over again today, I wouldn’t need quite so many sketches. And if you want to test that theory, feel free to hire me to design a mascot for your website or business.

And please let me know if you see old Peanut anywhere online. I’d love to know what happened to the guy.

Like durring the Super Bowl Sunday night, I watched the game with friends but I had a sheet of paper if front of me. By halftime, this is what I had…

These are just idle “see what comes out of the pen” drawings with very little thought put into them.  None are meant to be any one or anything specific. Well, other than Donald Duck, he’s rather specfic. A couple years back I almost had the chance to draw the Disney ducks for kaBoom! comics. KaBoom!’s deal with Disney fell apart before I had my chance. But I still find myself  scribbling out old Donald from time to time, just to stay in practice. Someday I’ll get my chance…

In other news, I just started an official “Rob Peters Illustration” page on Facebook. If you care need one more way to follow me, feel free to “like” me there.

For every project I do, I “reinvent the wheel” somewhat, adjusting my style and working method to fit the project.  I felt like the prehistoric landscapes in this book required a softer and more restrained color scheme than I usually use. But I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed until I read an article on Drawn.ca about artist Ryan Andrew’s unique coloring methods. I would adapt the technique as I went, but this gave me a starting point.

Let me show you how I worked one of the spreads from the book:

First I worked up this rough pencil sketch which I had my client approve. The book’s unique structure required comic book style inset panels which added an extra design challenge, but I came up with a solution that made everyone happy.

From there, I inked the image like I always do: on paper using a combination of my trusty Rapidograph pens and Pentel Brush pen. The inked artwork was scanned into Photoshop.

From here on, I began to deviate from my usual form. Following Ryan’s example, I colored everything in shades of gray. Major elements were done on different Photoshop layers to make selecting things easier later. By working in grayscale, I was able to make sure that there was proper contrast in the image before I got too deep in the coloring.

But that wasn’t quite enough for me. So I placed in a sloppy watercolor texture  in the background. I have a couple dozen of these textures that I’ve made over the years. They help eliminate the harsh, overly perfect feel that my Photoshop work can get sometimes. I used various layer effects (overlay, multiply, screen) as needed so that the texture showed through in places. Then I converted everything to CMYK color mode (this caused a few of the grey shades to turn blue for some reason, but that didn’t matter at this stage). 

I had planned to use Ryan’s method of coloring but found three colors to be too restrictive for my tastes. Instead, I used Photoshop’s Gradient Map tool and applied a custom gradient over the whole thing.

This turned my blacks into dark brown, mid-tones green, lighter tones into orange, and the whites became yellow.

I was almost done. But now came the longest, but most fun part: painting in the tones. Using my trusty Wacom Cintique and stylus, I painted in shadows and highlights. And I wasn’t afraid to deviate from my color scheme in a few places. I added blue into the sky and colored the dinosaur kids’ clothing less drab colors. I also lightened color of the linework in the background to help it recede and on the kids’ freckles (or are they scales? I was never sure).

And so here is the final product! I’m really quite proud of it.

I’m not sure if I’ll use this technique again for another book, after a few pages it might have been easier to simply color things using the CMYK values I had already established previously. But I will definitely try it again on a smaller project.

The book is currently only available at the band’s website, which you can find here.

One of my goals for the New Year is to produce more un-commissioned artwork. To stretch myself some and draw the sorts of things that are different from the stuff I’m paid to illustrate. And so, today I drew this highly impractical submarine. Like last weeks Guardian, this was drawn in pen and ink with no real planning beforehand.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments.

The lead character, an ankylosaurus, with the snout and two sets of horns had one of the most complex heads I had drawn in one of my books. And I realized that I needed some way to keep him right no matter the angles.

So I built a model. It’s my first attempt at building a little model like this, and I’m quite proud of how it turned out. So I thought I’d show off a few photos of the model. A special thanks to my wonderful wife for taking the photos. (Click on the photos to view them larger)

And here’s an image from the book.

Currently, the book is only available on the band’s website (which you can find here.)