Bring on September!

August is flying by! I leave for my first trip to Europe in September and it's gonna be an amazing 3 weeks. My best friend and I are heading to England, France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Italy and Ireland. EPIC! I am beyond excited but have SO much to do before we leave next week. Projects to finish, dentist appointments, birthday parties, shopping/packing and everything in between. OMGosh, I've got to get back to work.

BUT! I'm hoping I can do some posts while I'm over there just to say hi and let you know how the trip's going. A little "Where's Katie today?" sorta thing :) Well that's the plan anyway. As long as I can figure out how to post from my new iPhone and I have adequate wi-fi in the hotels we're staying in.

Here's hoping you have a delightful and full week. I leave you with these 2 pieces I created for the September issue of Friend Magazine. They were really fun to work on.

aminals

Today, I thought I'd show y'all a bit of my process...

When working out a sketch I always start out small and sloppy as I figure out shapes and gesture. They often look like scribbles that only I can decipher... these shown here are not as messy as they can be :)

After I get a rough that I like, I bust out my trusty tracing paper and clean it up. These animals were created for Lakeshore Learning and they wanted to see sketches first (of course), so I sent the blue lines and then once approved I finished them in Adobe illustrator.

In this case I knew I had to do a black/white and color version of each illustration so I tried to keep that in mind as I inked the black lines. I tried to save time by creating b/w shapes that could later be filled with a color without much additional modification.

In illustrator, I use custom strokes and half strokes A LOT. I like variation in line thickness. If you don't like making your own brushes, the droplet brush is standard with Ai (I think) and it's pretty good. You should try it out.

When illustrating scenes or more complex compositions than just small spots and character designs my process is pretty much the same. I don't post my rough sketches on the 'ol blog very often because I figure you guys would just look at them and be like "what the heck IS that?" But maybe I should? Maybe you'd like to see the rough and tumble skeletons under my work? Hmm, we'll see.

So yeah, there you have a bit of my process... leaving out the procrastinatory trips to the fridge, organizing my desk and mini self pep talks!

btw, If ever you have an Adobe illustrator question feel free to ask!