DRAWING TO PROCESS

I’m creating my first-ever notebooks this season and I thought I’d show you the design process from drawing to finished design. One day I’ll learn how to record what I’m doing in Photoshop and you can see alll the steps it takes to get a piece to the final layout stage.

Let’s get started!

I did the drawing above for a portfolio piece a couple months ago and thought it would look really sweet on a pocket notebook. This is a scan of the original artwork (background in acrylic & pastel, bird in conte crayon, charcoal, & colored pencil), so to get a wrap-around cover, I definitely needed to do some manipulation with the piece.

First, I needed to set up a file to the specifications of the print shop I used to produce the notebooks. I decided to go with a 3.5 x 5.5 notebook. In printing, you always need to include 3 things:
1. Bleed - This area is an extra .125” on each side of your piece. This is if your image needs color/ink printed all the way to the edges of your piece (‘full bleed’). It basically ensures that when the printer trims your pieces to size, you won’t get a weird white line around the edges if they accidentally trimmed a little outside of the trim line.
2. Trim Line - This is where the printer aims to cut your piece to size. Print shops often print multiple images of the same thing on one large piece of paper and then cut everything down the the proper dimensions.
3. Safety Margin - This area is .125” from the trim line, towards the inside of the piece. All of your important information of the piece (lettering, parts of an image you definitely don’t want cut off) needs to be inside this area. Like the bleed, this ensures that when the printer trims to size, important parts of your image don’t get cut off if they accidentally trim into the image past the trim line.

I also added a center line where the cover will be folded, so I don’t put any important information along that area. Finally, I added center lines for the back and front so everything is aligned properly! Sometimes, printers will want you to do the back and front on separate files (as my printer did), but I like to start it out this way so I can get a full picture of what I’m designing.

I placed my artwork on the right hand side of the workspace (the front of the notebook) and as you can see, I zoomed in on the bird and cut down on the empty background space around it. I then copied that image to the left hand side (the back) and had to do some manipulation to cover up the bird and make it into a simple background. I could have just painted a new background, but this way saved me some time! I also covered up the writing on the envelope and made it a little whiter.

The envelope lended itself well to add a little title for the notebook, so I picked a pretty font, placed it on and erased some of the bottom parts of the letters to make it look tucked behind the bird’s wings.

In my poster design of this image, I placed a scanned in black charcoal texture. I really liked it, so decided to use it for the journal as well. I started out with it black, but as I kept designing, I wanted to soften it up a bit, so I changed it to this greenish-blue color.

At this point, I thought I was pretty much done, but after I sat on it for a day, I felt like the back needed a little something extra. I mocked some things up and after getting feedback from my art group, I decided to add more to it.

I had this wallpaper design (it’s a vintage design, so I’m able to use it freely) saved from a previous project and thought it could add a nice touch. As you can see, I heavily manipulated it in Photoshop - turned the flowers into solid shapes, had the color almost match the greenish-blue of the border and then lightly erased it in spots for a really worn feel. It feels a little busy when laid out flat, but when folded, it helps add a lot of interest to the back cover and adds just the tiniest touch to the front without overwhelming the bird.

Next, I added my logo and information about the notebook and voila! Notebook design complete and off to the printer.

Can’t wait to get my hands on them and I’ll be sure to share them in my Instagram stories when they arrive!

Thanks for following along and as always, if you have any questions or comments, please drop them below. I’ll be sending out a shorter newsletter in December without a blog post, but I’ll be back in January!

♡ nicole

MEDIA EXPERIMENTS

 

In the next few months, I’ll be working on a series of work based on my residency at Space on Ryder Farm. Before I start it, I’m doing a bunch of media experiments to figure out what direction I want to go in for the pieces. I took a trip to Iceland a few years ago and have a ton of pictures, so I decided to use that as a base to experiment around. While the scenery is different between there and here, a lot of the content will be similar - older buildings, natural settings, and farm animals.

I’ve always been obsessed with memory, nostalgia, and the importance of place in our lives. I find it interesting that we can have an experience in a specific place and take photos of it (or observational sketches) and even so, over time, our perception of that places changes. Every time we revisit a memory - especially when telling a story about it to others - tiny details change without us even realizing it. Why is that? Personally, I think every time we remember something, we’re changing little details to make the experience fit what we felt at that time. And in a sense, that actually makes our memory of that time, place, or event even more truthful than the reality. I think that’s why people who experience the same thing can have drastically different memories of what happened. We all see things through a different lens.

In these experiments, I’m applying that idea directly to the technique and materials I’m using and fusing reality and my memories of that time into one piece. Of course, most art that is based on a real place or time is essentially doing that already - artists can’t help but infuse their experience onto reality. However, I’m interested in what it looks like to make that mental process visible. Photographs stand in for the ‘reality of the place’ and then paint, being an expressive medium, are a stand in for memory and experience.

PROCESS

Above are the photos I’ve based the three paintings in this post on. I bring the photo into Photoshop and turn it into a black and white image. I then flip it so it’s backwards and print it out on a laser printer. On my final paper, I put matte medium down, flip the image facedown on the paper and adhere it. Then I brush water over the paper and peel the paper away. What is left is a transferred image! I intentionally don’t transfer it super well, so some parts will be clear and most parts will just be an interesting texture.

After that, I paint on top of it - I obscure some areas, let some parts peek through, draw over an area and change it completely, or add details that didn’t exist in the photo. The result is a painting that to me, feels more authentic to the experience I had than the photo I took.

I’m sure I’ll be talking more about this process and the idea behind it in the future, but if you have any questions, please drop them in the comments section!

It’s fall!!! Get out there and make some memories.

♡ nicole

PROCESS & DEVELOPMENT: THE WITCH OF BLACKBIRD POND

 

Welcome to my first behind the scenes look at my process! A quick word about why I’m illustrating what I am: I’m in the midst of completely revamping my portfolio - starting from square one so to speak. I’m gearing it towards book cover and poster (movie/theater) work, so I’m assigning myself various projects to build it up. For illustrators, we are bringing to life someone else’s words, so in picking projects for my portfolio, I’m finding existing stories that are fairly well known within their audience. That way, when art directors look at my portfolio, they can easily tell if I’m able to take a story and communicate what it’s about.

The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a children’s/young adult historical fiction novel and it’s a really fun read to revisit as an adult. It felt like a perfect fit to illustrate as a cover. I learned a lot while illustrating this and it set the tone for the portfolio work I created after that and still am today. It also so happens that the idea for this came to me waaay more quickly than most, so I actually didn’t do a whole lot of ideation & sketches beyond what you see here. Let’s get started!

I usually start with pencil sketches and move on to digital sketches only when I’m trying to figure out values or I’m having a particularly hard time figuring out my composition. It’s easier to quickly change things around or try things without redrawing the entire sketch. In this case, I had a couple strong ideas right off the bat, so I decided to start them digitally.

In this second set of sketches, you can see I flipped the values of idea #1 - after feedback, I realized that what I thought read really well (the shape of a dress with someone’s hands folded across her chest surrounded by prairie grass) didn’t at all. Making the dress area darker and the grass lighter helped out with readability. Before, the dress area was confusing and felt like a random shape. In the image above, there are only slight differences between the top row and the bottom. Essentially, I was trying to make the grasses a little more wild and organic in the bottom row.

This is the final idea I went with - I played with a light image of a house in the upper left of the skirt, but ultimately felt it took away from the clean shape of the dress. It kind of stops your eye instead of letting it flow from the ship up to the hands.

On the left, I played with my values until I felt satisfied. For those who don’t know, values are your shadows (darkest), highlights (lightest), and midtones (everything between those two). Being mainly self-taught, I actually had zero idea of the importance of values in a drawing until I started the illustration program I’m now in last year. Turns out, it can really make or break an image! It’s also so much easier to work on a final drawing and color when this is all figured out at the beginning. On the right are some quick color studies.

Now with the composition and values are figured out, I printed out the thumbnail to the final size of my drawing. Currently, I’m working fairly small since these pieces are just for my portfolio and not for actual print.

At this stage, I lay tracing paper over the print-out of my thumbnail and trace the image. In this case, I traced the important shapes - the hands, the dress, and the ship. I also traced the main fountain-like grass shapes and the shape of the sky/clouds behind the ship. I then flipped the tracing paper over, laid another piece over of paper over it, and from that, traced the image backwards.

Why did I trace it backwards? I flip that face down onto my final nice drawing paper, take the round part of scissors (you can also use a spoon or a baren) and burnish it onto the drawing surface. Basically that means I’m transferring the graphite of the top layer onto the surface below- this transfers faint lines of my drawing. This way, I’m not trying to figure out the drawing or erasing too much on my final piece of paper and have a base to work from.

I could have printed my thumbnail backwards to cut out the first step, but this let me refine some things and work out kinks on the first piece of tracing paper. That way, I was burnishing a really clean line drawing.

The list below the images is a written structure for my values - for some reason it helps me stick to the values more rather than just looking at my thumbnail.

To create the grass I did a lot of drawing, erasing, drawing, erasing. In the upper left image, you can see I started out blocking the main fountain grasses. I also drew a small test patch of how I wanted it to look overall. In the upper right image, I laid in some pencil and smudged it to create a base tone for the grass rather than working on the pure white.

On the bottom left, you can see that the bottom half of the grass looks kind of blurry. That was the stage right before the defined grass at the top. I basically drew in all the grass and then blotted it with an eraser - this created a lot of midtone variations. Then I went in and filled in the darker areas and defined the highlights and lines. The final drawing is on the right!

On the left is the scanned and untouched image of my drawing. If I’m coloring digitally, I like to get the black and white image all corrected and refined first. Graphite is notoriously hard to scan or photograph, so this helps me adjust the image more to what it looks like in real life. I also made it a little darker.

After that came the text! The author name is a pre-existing font and the title is hand-lettered - I took a couple fonts I liked, combined elements of them and then put my own spin on it. On the right is another batch of color studies.

After a ton of back and forth, this is the color version I ended up with. I wanted it to feel full color while still retaining some of the grayscale I’m so in love with.

I absolutely loved working on this drawing and I hope this was a helpful look into what it takes to get a final piece! If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I’d love to answer them.

Happy Wednesday friends,

♡ nicole

 

WELCOME!

Welcome to my first blog post! I’ll be honest, I’ve tried writing blogs before and I never enjoyed it. Which kind of makes sense because I also hate journaling (though I keep trying that as well). However, I’ve been growing and learning so much in the past couple years as an artist, that I’d love a dedicated place to pass along knowledge and share more process work.

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One of my favorite things to talk about are the struggles and triumphs of being a creative. I feel I’m in a unique place in my life right now to share mine and hopefully it will connect with some of you - I know whenever I find an artist who has a similar path as mine, it’s like a big giant hug from the universe.

Why do I feel in a good place to talk about that? Lots of reasons:
* I’m not a full time artist, I still have a ‘day’ job. I’ve been able to be part-time since 2019, but worked full-time for 10+ years before that. My goal is to be a full time freelancer.
* My day job has nothing to do with illustration - I’ve always worked in restaurants and that’s a whole other beast to contend with - good and bad.
* I didn’t go to art school (I studied theater!). I didn’t even have a community or network of visual artists until the last year or so - and turns out it is SUCH a giving and welcoming community, especially in the illustration sector.
* I’m 37! Why does that matter? Well, it doesn’t really, but from my personal experience, it is a whole other factor when you are trying to ‘make it’ as a full-time artist and most people in that position are way younger than you. As hard as I try for this to not be the case, it can come with a lot of insecurities and questioning. I appreciate professional artists who are vocal about when they started and normalize still figuring it out or changing careers after 35 (or 50! 70!), so I think it’s beneficial to be open about that particular struggle. Especially while I’m smack in the middle of the journey towards making art my main source of income. When I found out that one of my favorite illustrators, Yuko Shimuzu, graduated from art school around my age and didn’t start full-time as an illustrator until her 40s…..it was such a comfort and relief. It meant a lot that she was open about sharing that and it really helped me gain a renewed sense of peace that I’m on the right path. If some of you reading this are in the same position, you’re not alone!!

There you have it. A little about me and a big THANK YOU for joining me here.

♡ nicole