The Neighborhood’s Night – Page 7

March 30, 2021March 25, 20212 Comments

Here’s the 5th illustration for the book project I just finished for Learning A-Z. Page 7 of The Neighborhood’s Night by Juliana Catherine.

This is the last one in the project that has fancy lighting. From here on out the characters will be indoors under regular lights, which is a lot easier, but not as pretty.

Anyway, Leena and Amir are in the backseat of the car as their mom drives them away from their house towards the evacuation shelter. Leena is sad and worried. Amir is too young to understand, so is sleeping. He spends most of the book asleep, actually.

In the sketch phase for this one, I originally drew it at a different angle because I didn’t realize two-year olds, the age Amir is supposed to be, still have to be in rear-facing carseats. I thought they could front-face when they turned one. Nope. It either changed since my kids were that age, or I was remembering it wrong. Anyway, at first I drew them both facing forward. I had to completely redraw it at this angle so that both the kids’ faces are visible. Glad I caught it before I sent it to the client.

An illustration for page 7 of The Neighborhood's Night by Juliana Catherine. It's the interior of a car showing two children in the backseat. There's a toddler sleeping in his carseat and his sister looks sad and worried beside him. Outside the window, the trees are silhouetted against a red sky.

The Neighborhood’s Night – Page 3

March 26, 2021March 25, 2021Leave a comment

Here’s the first illustration for the book project I just finished for Learning A-Z. Page 3 of The Neighborhood’s Night by Juliana Catherine. Like with all the interior illustrations in this project, this one’s a spot illustration that will be the width of one page without any bleed. The image has a half inch on either side that will likely be cut off, but allows the publisher some room to shift the image left or right or to adjust the size a bit if they like. Like the cover image, the lighting was quite important on this one too. I rather like the swirling smoke.

An illustration for page 3 of The Neighborhood's Night by Juliana Catherine. The image shows an interior shot of a girl's bedroom. A worried girl in bed has the covers pulled up to her chin and is looking out the window. Outside, it is nighttime, but the sky is red and there is smoke swirling around a streetlight;

Project Complete! The Neighborhood’s Night

March 25, 2021March 25, 20214 Comments

I just finished illustrating a graded reader from Learning A-Z. The Neighborhood’s Night by Juliana Catherine. It’s about a family who has to evacuate their home due to forest fires near their neighborhood. Here’s a mock-up of the cover. It was work-for-hire, so it’s copyright Learning A-Z.

A mock-up of the cover of the book The Neighborhood's Night by Juliana Catherine Illustrated by Karen B. Jones. The image includes text over an illustration of people and vehicles on a street during an evacuation due to a nighttime forest fire.

I sure got practice drawing vehicles on this one and the changing perspective along the curve was challenging, but the most important part of this illustration was the lighting. I wanted it bright enough to show what was going on and all the people and such, but still look like it’s actually nighttime. An argument could be made that maybe it should have been more smoky, but the haze would have obscured more of the background details, so I went light on the smoke. This image took longer than all the rest of the images in the book.

The full cover image actually wraps around the back. I’ll share that later.

I’m going to dole out the interior illustrations over the next few days here, so keep an eye out if that interests you.

Color Version of Inktober #28

November 26, 2020November 30, 2020Leave a comment

Inktober #28 was Float. Here’s that one colored in.

Girls at a sleepover playing Light as a feather, stiff as a board. One girl levitates in midair while 5 friends chant the magic words. The floating girl observes that "This feels weird!"

Poinsettia

November 10, 2020November 10, 2020Leave a comment

I think this is going to be my holiday card image this year.

An illustration of a poinsettia plant on a green background.

Color Version of Inktober #22

November 6, 2020November 2, 2020Leave a comment

Here’s a color version of my faceless chef.

An illustration of a woman in a chef's uniform standing with a spoon in her hand. Drawn in a simplified style without a face or detailed hands.

Color Version of Inktober #21

November 5, 2020November 2, 2020Leave a comment

Two babies in color this time.

An illustration of a human toddler and a young dragon curled up around each other, asleep. The dragon is green and the toddler is black.

Inktober 2020 #31 – Crawl

October 31, 2020October 31, 20202 Comments

So, since this is posting on Halloween, I thought it should be a Halloween themed image. So, the two things that come to mind with crawl is creepy crawly bugs and crawling babies. Bugs only seem really Halloweeny if it’s a spider or if they’re crawling over a corpse. I already did a spider this month and corpses are gross. Trying to not go for too gross since my target audience are kids.

So, a Halloween-themed baby.

I doodled a baby pumpkin-head, a baby Dracula, a baby Frankenstein’s monster, and a baby zombie. By the way, baby zombie? NO. Not cute. Bad. Very bad.

And I also doodled this baby Death, which is the one I liked best. So, that’s the one I finished off for today.

Whew! This is the last one! I’m done. I hope you enjoyed the month of inktober as much as I did. Thanks for watching!