I know it has been a little while since I posted but I have been pushing really hard to complete work on the children’s book that has been on my plate for over four years.  I took a lot of time off the job and have been painting all my canvases at the same time, making sure colors are consistent and the like.  Here is a picture of the progress.  Several of the images I painted before are going to require some re-working to make sure they are in line with what is happening now.  I’m pushing for a much more cohesive teal shadow color for one thing.

It has been a little since I posted a painting for the book so figured I’d better get on it again.  Truth be told, I was invited to participate in a show with a France theme so very soon, hopefully, everyone will be able to enjoy a larger one of my animal paintings.  Regardless, that shouldn’t be an excuse for no posts.  Oh, and I got sick.  I was holding my 7 month old, who was sick and while I was talking she reached up and put her hand in my mouth.  It was like that scene in the Matrix.  I could feel the assault wave of germs leaping from her hand into my mouth.  Still, no excuses!

In this panel, Ruby June has been discovered on her quest to find the Voice of the Sea and is being hauled off to have a chat with the mighty Coo-Thoo-Loo.  Never a dull day for our heroine!

I arranged all the panels in my studio to get a sense of how things looked together.  I needed to see if there were any glaring issues with values not looking right together before gelling everything and getting started on my base colors.  As you can see, I already have 2 of the panels painted though I will probably be touching up at least one of them.  It was that second panel that I painted that I wasn’t overly happy with and decided I needed to paint all the panels together to keep consistency in color.  I started gelling over the panels three days ago and have all but five done as of this post.  I will finish them up tomorrow though will probably have to wait for a little before starting on my base colors so the gel can dry.  I certainly don’t want to jump the gun.

The last panel value pass!  I was beginning to think it would never get here.  This one didn’t pose too many issues, save for the perspective.  Once I get these home, I plan to lay them all out and have a look at them as a whole.  Hopefully I won’t see anything that stands out and needs fixing, or at least nothing major that won’t fix itself in the painting stage.

Here we have Ruby June brought before Coo-Thoo-Loo.  It looks pretty grim for our heroine but not to worry, I have it on good authority that she comes out the other side very well.

Finally wrapped up the value pass of Ruby June confronting Coo-Thoo-Loo.  This one took a while to finish as I was filming every step of the way and the camera disk would fill up every 20 to 30 minutes.  I would have been able to post the movie today save for the fact that I left my second laptop at home today and that is the one I create my lovely movies on.  Bummer.  Oh well, I’ll have something awesome to post tomorrow!  In any case, this one was causing me issues with the masses of deep ones behind and around the octopus king.  I wasn’t happy with the way they were coming out and ended up deciding they were too well lit.  I needed to push them into the background and just hint at them which meant re-rendering them after I was almost done.  Worked out better in the end, though.

Still plugging away on this one.  The whole process of filming work on this panel is taking some time.  I’m using a camera with video features and every 20 minutes or so the disk gets full so I have to download all the movies to my computer, free up space on the disk, and then restart the process.  additionally, after 4 or 5 hours of filming, the battery is near dead so I have to re-charge it.  Still, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to finish it in another 1 or 2 days.  It will be fun to see the whole of the value process compressed into a 4 or 5 minute span.  Here is the latest progress on the panel where Coo-Thoo-Loo is having a discussion with Ruby June.

Two more charcoals to go and it looks like I’m going to have to work on them both at the same time.  This one I started today and I decided it was high time I documented my process a bit more so I’m filming my work on this from start to finish for the value layer.  Because I’m filming at work, I will probably start on the last painting values in between when I am filming this one.  So this is where I left it off today.  Got everything blocked in and am starting to push in some detail already.