A drawing from sketch to art

Hi Chaps,

I've just done a set of black and white samples of various characters aimed at early reader/chapter books.
You can see five of them on my website, the first five in the block of black and white pictures.
But here, I thought I'd post the development of one picture from first idea sketch in my sketch pad, to rough, scanned into photoshop, to finished drawing, so you can have a look.
I'll talk through the little brother stamping onto puddles.
First, is this idea sketch I did with real pencil in my real life sketch pad, while watching tv.
I do mostly sketch straight in photoshop, and just do all the stages there, but this time I just happened to be doing it on my sketch pad.

This one wasn't quite right, and the idea crystallised a bit in my head, and I was able to come up with this.

I do find that if I get a good image in my mind it's sort of a matter of 'copying' it out of my head onto paper.
I then reworked the drawing of the head a bit, and did this separate sketch of the head.

I then scanned it all in and stuck the second sketch and the head together in photoshop, like so

and then knocked them down to 40% opacity, a bit like putting it on a lightbox and putting a new sheet of paper over it, and drew the final 'inked' image.

And there we are.
Hope that's interesting and maybe a bit informative too :)

Jungle Shorts

Hi again chaps.

Following on from the last few posts, here's another bit of work done recently.

This is the sketch stage of the cover for a book about a boy who's Mum buys him embarrassing Jungle patterned shorts to play football in. (I only put the pattern in with the colour though)

It was quite a nice tight brief for what was they wanted included image-wise, which I often quite like. Sometimes if it's left a bit open I get options paralysis, but if some constraints are put on, I can get something out nice and quick.

So it was a nice job to do.

In other news, I've decided to do some ideas for some greeting type cards.

At the moment I'm planning on these being based around bears

(Lot of bears in my work at the mo, and more coming up, so I'll be getting a lot of practise.)

But I'll put up some of the bear sketches soon.

Swoon

Well, after a week away, and a rebuild of my pc, which basically took up just over two weeks in total, I'm ready to post a follow up to my last post about Miss Sampson, the new teacher.

(and yes I did lose stuff in my pc rebuild, annoyingly. Somehow, however methodical I try and be, I always forget something. And all the driver installs for the hardware stuff is always awkward, and I end up spending a morning trying to install the print drivers or something.)

Here is the full finished picture, with swooning little lad, and jealous classmate.

Also, I've posted my original pencil sketches of the lad and the little girl, so you can see how they developed.