New illustrations!

See, didn’t I say I’d be updating soon? It’s so helpful to have a real workspace now–I love being able to go up to my studio and work and have everything organized and accessible… So in just the last few days I’ve gotten four things done that I’d been working on for months, which is very satisfying. Anyway, these are the sample illos I’m planning on sending along with my manuscript:

So, there we are–what I’m hoping is that this bunch shows my best work, and also shows that I can draw characters consistently from one scene to another, show people in motion, and do outside and inside settings… I don’t know if it’s really the best strategy to send my sample illustrations with my story or not, but I’d really love to write AND illustrate this story, so I’m just going to chance it. I do keep seeing submission guidelines for various publishers that sound like they are interested in people who both write and illustrate, so I think if I just keep at it eventually I’d find someone open to both… Anyway, I’m going to give it a shot. We’ll see!

still working on my cartoon

I got a chance to do a background painting for my cartoon– just thought I’d post that… this frame has the main character (haven’t named her yet, she’s just ‘the girl’ so far :-) just walking into the scene from the right… I love working on this thing, I wish I could do it more–I have no confidence that it’ll ever actually be finished! *sigh* I actually have quite a few frames done now–which adds up to about two seconds of animation :)  Still, it’s really fun to see her walk across the screen looking sulky, stop, & then look over her shoulder while the camera zooms in on her face…It makes me happy! I’ve watched it like fifty times, it’s ridiculous :-P

I shall become an animator!!

Well, you know, gotta keep expanding the ol’ repertoire, right? Why shouldn’t I make a cartoon?!

…….Oh, right, because I’m not a team of animators…I don’t have a bunch of drones at my disposal to save me from having to do the thankless chore of drawing a million in-betweens….hmm…perhaps there is a flaw in this plan! I don’t care, I’m still interested in trying it.

I’ve just recently had this idea for a cartoon kind of thing set to Berlioz’s “Ronde Du Sabbat,” which is a really fun, scary-yet-whimsical piece of classical music… I think once I have some time to fiddle around with it I’ll be able to accomplish what I have in mind with just scanning in drawings, working on them in Photoshop, and then using Windows Movie Maker to animate it. Not sure, but I think it’ll work. I could use Flash, but from what I’ve seen online, I don’t think that would have the look I want. Too smooth and computer-generated looking– I really want it to be rough and to make sure it has the look of my drawings, not an artificially smoothed-out Flash drawing, which has a very distinctive look of its own. Anyway, something fun to do when I can get to it…I have some very rough sketches which I’ll scan in and add to this post later.