new year, new me

New year, new me. Well, kind of.

I'm 33. When I turned 18 way back in 1997 I left home and went off to college where I met something that would become part of my life forever: the internet. My generation made the message boards, the forums, the chat rooms... and really, to do those things, you need an avatar.

So, one night while I was on break at work I sketched out a caricature of me and colored it in with prismacolors. And that's been my avatar for 2 or 3 years now. People who know me in person who find me online always seem to be amused that my little rendering of myself looks like me; well, me-ish. I decided it could look a little more like me. So, I sat down at my desk yesterday and went about updating my avatar...

The progression - from current to new...

I took the old avatar, enlarged it, got rid of the color, and added a new face. I printed that out as a blue page, inked it, scanned that back in - colorized it and then printed that out to color over:

 So, now I suppose I should get to work on the rest of the projects I have lined up. Hopefully your new year has gotten off to a productive start!

Picture Story: bear ride

I needed an illustration for January for my calendar. We have the four seasons here in Michigan, so, January is usually a picture of something cold and snowy, because that's what it is. Somehow I decided on a girl and a bear trekking through the snow for the picture...

And so it was sketched:

Then sketch was scanned in photoshop, converted to a blue page. That was printed, 

inked, scanned into photoshop and cleaned up and converted into  a file...

That file was filled with color and then printed off to be colored by hand.

 Once the entire page was colored it was scanned into photoshop.

 Where I began to add other elements, like the snowy ground and the sky...

The sky needed a little more visual oomph, so, I added a layer of a 

scan of one of my paintings: sunkissed alchemy phantasmagoria

There was snow on the ground, so there should be snowflakes in the air. 

The issue was to leave them behind or on top of the girl & bear...

 I decided to leave the snowflakes on top, so, I selectively deleted some of them...

And there it is: bear ride

You can find "bear ride" at sarahkdesigns or sunshinesight

Picture Story: the rainy fox

Hey, have I mentioned the calendar? Yeah, I know. It's kind of my fixation for the until 25 December. So, one illustration was completed last week and now I've finished another.

The rainy fox started out as a sketch that I drew while waiting to get an oil change for my car... I scanned the sketch, printed it as a blue page, inked the blue page, and scanned that back in and made it into a file.

There's a decision that I made about this illustration: no outlines. In my pre-digital illustrating days — objects in pictures never had outlines and everything was rendered by hand with colored pencil... somehow when pen & ink enters into the picture - there end up being outlines, and I decided that this picture would be outline free — so I "blocked" my picture so that it had no outlines. Blocking is a fairly arbitrary process - you just fill the parts of the picture with color. And I guess color schemes are just kind of inherent, at least they are to me. Even if I'm not precisely sure what I think a picture should look like when done - I have a vague idea of the colors, tone, mood, and presentation... 

You know, the sky isn't aqua blue with white clouds, and the ground isn't peacock green.

Since it's the picture for November — the original sketch has some raindrops penciled in, and "the rainy fox" is scrawled across the bottom of the page. So, when it came time to fill in my blocked file — I picked photos of leaves on the ground and a scan of a watercolor that fit that mood and then superimposed them over my layer of color blocking.

The tree is always the truly labor intensive part of the picture. I select some of my digital photos of tree bark and manipulate them in photoshop to turn a couple photos into a full tree.

So, once I have the colors the way I want them, and the layer overlays of photos or paintings for texture or effect — then it's time to print that image in order to draw over it with prismacolors.

I started by coloring in the details on the fox.

And then I gave the tree the illusion of dimensionality...

 And then it was time to color in the clouds and add the rain...

So, in the end, what started as a sketch becomes a full color illustration:

the rainy fox — Sarah Knight

Picture Story update: lightshine

Procrastination — who doesn't? Maybe people with personal planners who worry about schedules or something? Well, I'm not one of those people I guess. So, in theory, I took the week off from working on the calendar. I mean, last week I finished the second illustration (only 10 more to go). But there was something about the next picture on the docket that I'm just not ready to commit to or in the mood to work on, so I'm going to shove that to some far off back corner of my mind until I generate a solution — not unlike one of those 'moments' on House - where Wilson would be blathering on about something and House would have that epiphany about exactly what malady or combination of maladies the patient had.

So, on a whim, I decided that instead of plowing through another illustration I was going to rework something that had always bothered me about one of my older illustrations...

"lightshine"

 the original version...

and the new and improved version:

It wasn't really until 2002 that I started illustrating in a fashion that involved a lot of photoshop. Before then everything was colored pencils and bristol. Sketches were transferred from my sketchbook to the bristol via tracing paper, and well, that was it... and then time marched on and now I end up interfacing a lot of things on the computer. Technically, I guess it saves me the trouble of drawing the picture 4 times before I color it (sketch it, trace it, color the back of the trace, draw the trace onto paper)...

So, it was in June of 2009 that I made "lightshine." And it was my first endeavor with computer generated sunshine. The original looks okay and all, and I vaguely remember how I formatted the whole thing, but I was never exactly thrilled with how it looked.  It was very flat and thin and like two-dimensional. Plus I played with feathering, blur, and layer styles — probably for the first time.

It was later in November of 2009 when I was working on penguin pals that I took a more calculated effort in making rays of sunshine:

 This is how it began (above) — and after some toggling with tools and copying, pasting, and rotating — this is how it looked:

These were my initial efforts, and they ended up here:

 penguin pals

 You see those 4 lines there — that emanate from the sun? They annoy me. Something wasn't quite aligned right or sized right...
I would subsequently remake the file for the sunshine into this:

Very "Wizard of Op" — I know ; ) That is, btw, like the coolest book I read as a child.

Anyway, that was the fix that I used when I was working on what I think of as the sunshine illustrations, which include this:

yellow warblers sunshine song

Subsequently, when I decided to fix the sunshine on lightshine some 3 years later — that's the file I referenced. So, now I'm happy with the way the picture looks. You can check out the new and improved "lightshine" here.

Yeah, so now I guess it's time to get back to illustration 3 for the calendar...
Have a lovely weekend!

Picture Story: summer flight

Have I mentioned the calendar? Yeah, that thing. Well, because I'd rather be frantically cleaning the house the week before Christmas (not), I'm trying to stave off the possibility that I will also be trying to frantically finish the calendar graphics (which inevitably end up in sarahkdesigns or sunshinesight).

Anyway: 1 illustration complete as of this weekend! (just imagine that confetti and balloons fell from the ceiling)

I get out of the habit of drawing, I mean sort of. The sketchbook is ever present in my bag, as are the pencils and the pencil sharpener. But sometimes the sketches are for one of those projects that I'll get around to finishing someday... and then, of course, there are all the ideas for future projects and thumbnail sketches and half conceived ideas. 

So, since I'm one of those people who gifts art and makes my own greeting cards, certain holidays compel me to make things. I did these for Father's day (click here). Now, those 2 bluebirds were something I had actually drawn for some illustration that never quite materialized, but they ended up here in this picture. Anyway, I decided I could enlarge them and color in some details to make them 5X7 pictures — that I could give to my father for father's day... and when I was working on them — it occurred to me that it would be cool to use my bird drawings — enlarge them and reprint and recolor or over-render them and convert them into 5X7 bird prints... and then I got busy with cleaning and ninety degree weather (and probably watching tv and sleeping and going to work) — and well, someday I'll get around to that project, right?

But, working on these did rekindle my ongoing love of working with colored pencils. Don't get me wrong, I still love my digital photos and the magic of photoshop, but I can draw, very well, thank you.

So, one day while I was on break at work I sketched out a group of poppies and decided they needed snails — because I like snails... and then when I decided to use that sketch for the calendar — I decided it also needed some birds: bluebirds. Now, I had drawn these bluebirds way back in 2008:

 ...and I was never thrilled with how I illustrated them at the very last minute. So, "bluebirds & tulips" became one of those forgotten / not-so-good illustrations that exists on a file as a PSD, but otherwise is lost somewhere in the catalog of my work. It's a perfunctory illustration, but it isn't stellar... but I thought of it when I wanted to add birds to my poppies & snails picture.

 As usual, I scanned my sketch of the poppies, printed it as a blue page, inked the blue page, and scanned that into photoshop where after some editing it became this:

I printed the image (sans blue background) to color over with prismacolors.

 Now, while I was working on coloring that print-out, I was also working on fixing those bluebirds in flight that I illustrated back in 2008. In the mean time, it occurred to me that my Father's birthday was coming up — and I needed a gift. So, re-doing the bluebirds served 2 purposes: my new illustration & a gift. Because for the purposes of my calendar graphics — all I need is a scan of the picture I have made, someone else can have the original framed and hanging on a wall.

So, I copied the layer with the bluebirds from the original file, enlarged them, blurred over and edited out some details, and printed out an image that I could color over:

 And in the mean time I colored the poppies as well. I scanned both of those pictures into the computer, and after some editing — put them together in a file with some layers derived from my photos of the sky and portions of scans of my abstract acrylic paintings. So, it's finished:

"summer flight" by Sarah Knight

And now it's time to get to work on the next picture ; )

busy busy busy...

So, it's September now.  And it's a mere 3 months before Christmas.  So, that means that it's time to start working on the calendar. Yes, I am that relative that makes a calendar as a catchall gift for all my relatives every year... I've been doing it since at least 2005.

 Every calendar is as different as it is the same.  After making them for 3 or 4 years I finally figured out how to transfer some of the parts from one year to the next — like the grids and changing the dates — since I do the whole thing in photoshop instead of just coming up with the graphics and sending them off to a printer and paying an arm and a leg to have them made — something which kind of entirely defeats the point of giving out a homemade gift.  At the core, I am a thrifty gifter. Enjoy your socks, eventually you'll need them...

 Anyway, at some point in time I need to know that my 12 illustrations are chugging along the trail of progress.  Since I use the same technique for all 12 — I've found it useful to make myself a schedule — to know that I have 12 illustrations sketched out, that the sketches are scanned and printed as blue pages which will then be inked, the inked drawings will be scanned back in and a PSD file will be created where I fill in the file; I may need to print that out and color over the fills and scan it back in, and eventually, the thing becomes a completed illustration...

But really, everything starts out as a sketch, or as multiple sketches that will be combined via the magic of photoshop:

I drew this one while getting an oil change...

 Sometimes sketches that were done for other purposes get sucked into the calendar graphics project, and they get converted into

 Sometimes I forget that I used a sketch last year and just use it again...

 And sometimes something that was drawn for last year's calendar didn't get completed in time, so there it sits waiting for the next year...

And then blue pages get inked:

 

So, if I'm not sleeping or at work, then I'm probably sitting somewhere coloring a drawing or at the computer moving pixels around on the screen. But this year, I will not be finishing everything at the last minute. It doesn't mean I'll be enjoying my December, just that I won't be hastily completing pictures.
; )

Have you started your holiday preparations yet?