A Cloudy Day: Part four

In progress illustrations
A change in sky color

As I'm in the process of writing up a newsletter I figured it's about time I put up the cover for my newest children's book "A cloudy Day" so I can link to it. This is just my own text layout as I don't have the final version of the cover available to me at this point. Finishing off the final two spot illustrations for this book tonight so it can head off to print soon!

Samantha Cover : book Two : Part Three

part one : thumbnails and rough sketches
part two : Layout color choices

I'm pretty sure I finished the cover for the second book in the samantha series today. Just in time to announce the kickstarter campaign for the first book. The goal is to be able to raise $500 to use towards costs associated with printing and promotion of "Samantha loses The Box Turtle" as a paperback book. It's currently only available as an e-reader and has done quit well with some requests for hard copies of the books. Check out the kickstarter campaign page to learn more! 16 days to go!http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2016518480/samantha-loses-the-box-turtle

    The cool thing about supporting the printing of this book through the kickstarter campaign is that no matter how little you donate, you will get goodies in return. At different donation levels you get prizes ranging from copies of the e-book, copies of the paperback book, stickers, an original piece of art by me!, or you can even have yourself or your kid written into the third book in the series!  In many cases you would really just be donating the amount that it would typically cost to buy the book or e-book anyway.

                          

 The sample below was my first draft of the cover on a grey scale layout. The author and I agreed that the background cupboards were too dark and her face was painted a bit too differently than the first book. So I adjusted those elements with guache as well as a few other tiny details.

 Below I've posted the cover of the first book in the series. Which is currently available as an e-reader on Amazon.com and elsewhere. You can click ont he link on the left of this blog to buy the book on amazon.

Pond Watercolor Sketch

Over the past weekend I had a bit of time for a couple more small watercolor sketches. I'll probably be posting a few of these every so often. They are all are around 5"x6" and took about 15-30 min. In many cases I consciously simplify objects to favor having a finished sketch in my allotted time rather than a more detailed unfinished sketch.

        

Cover Layout Color Samples

It's time to chose the background layout color ! I've got fourteen options to start. Planning to get a general idea form these main options and then maybe tweak the color even more once the client sends me in a particular direction. I put the cover from the first book in the series at the bottom as a reference.

Samanth Cover Design: Book Two

Part one cover design process for first book in this series
Part two for cover design process of first book in this series

        Today I finished off the rough draft of the final cover art for the second book in the "Samantha" Series authored by Daisy Griffin.

As the book cover is the most important illustration in the whole book I tend to start with as many thumbnail sketches as I can come up within a reasonable amount of time. Usually I shoot for ten or more. In this case we had a rough idea of the layout we wanted as we would keep in line with the first book in the series.

This was a hard cover to narrow down as I liked number twelve showing the glowing light coming from inside the incubator, most people polled seemed to like number nine which I also liked, we then started with number eight which the author liked. Really I would have been happy with about half of these concepts.

At this point the author didn't like seeing the eggs and a hatched chic in the same image and preferred number six. So I did a rough from that thumbnail.

from here the author made More suggestions and we went into a more finished sketch.

Then color samples and into the final art seen at the top of this post.

Watercolor Landscapes: North Hero Vermont

For more of my Vermont Landscapes got to :  Oil Landscapes   , Watercolor sketch

I spent the past weekend with my fiance at a friends camp in North hero Vermont, enjoying the summer. I found the time to squeeze in some small watercolor landscapes during my stay on the lake. I enjoyed it so much that I'm now considering spending a few days throughout the summer to make up a  ton of these miniature landscapes all over vermont and make a zazzle store specially devoted to vermont postcards, calendars and the like. I still hope to work in atleast a few oil landscapes this summer to have in local businesses and will likely make that  a priority, while doing these watercolor sketches when time is tight, perhaps some of them could become more finished oil paintings later.

Pigs under the post office:one

Over the past month I've enjoyed finally putting in some quality time with my new children's book " Pigs Under the Post office". We've designed characters and narrowed down to the final thumbnails and I'm hoping to have the final drawings done by the end of the week.

 I did a bunch of thumbnail sketches for each  page of the book then the client and I chose the ones laid out below.

Beagle Watercolor Sketch

I've decided to try and bring my watercolors and sketch pad with me more often as I find myself away from the studio more and more these days. In my adventures with my fiance I've been in all sorts of places I would have loved to sketch or paint whether it be up in the backwoods on her four wheeler overlooking a beautiful farm scape at sunset, out on the water in kayaks observing the natural beauty of waterfalls and the powerful arched gnarly trees that lean out over the water, snowshoeing through snow laden forests and fields, or the long road trips that have carried us into many wonderful sunsets. I've seen more wild animals with her in the past few months than I have seen in my entire life here in Vermont. Moose, deer, foxes, raccoons, peacocks (well on a farm), rabbits, beavers, geese, fish and the like. So finally after many years as a practicing artist I've decided to get better at sketching. Here's my first go at it!  This is Biscuit who was kind enough to pose for me Saturday after a long day of helping Barbie at her weekend job. I'm thinking this was about a fifteen minute sketch, 4"x6" watercolor.

Mature Milking Devon Bull

I don't really have much I wanted to say about these Bull drawings. I just wanted to post the finals since i posted some process work a few weeks back. The first set are of the male Bulls and the second are the female cows I illustrated last year for the same client. These aren't perfect by any means but I am pretty happy with them considering all that went into them.

BBQ LOGO 3: Vector Art

BBQ LOGO 1: Clients original Logo and my initial rough concept sketches
BBQ LOGO 2: Refined pencil sketch and discussion of tangent points

  Over the past month or so I've brought  a few projects to completion and dug in deep with a couple of more recent projects. This BBQ logo design was started months ago so i was quit happy to finally bring it to completion.

                                                    First I did a finalized ink link drawing.

Then I did the final digital art. We originally wanted to use either watercolor or oil paint for the final but the client eventually decided they wanted to have the logo blown up large enough to go on the side of their concession truck. SO at that point I made the leap to digital art and discovered a way to vectorize the final art. More on that below. I did a few samples for the t-shirt design but mostly focused on the business card design as my starting point that would lead into the other product designs.

The business card design process involved many steps. It would take too much room to show all the process but I have a sampling below. Basically I did font samples, background color samples, layout samples. The client liked a cropped version on a  black background so i then refined that further with a few more ideas involving a gradient background color.

So to this point I had designed, business cards, t-shirts and product labels. Now I needed to take this art produced at a fairly small size and enlarge it to a really huge size without losing any of the quality. Typically an artist would create the original art in adobe illustrator as vector art but I didn't have the option available to me as I generally work in traditional mediums. So for this I turned to an online program called "vector magic". In my initial tests I immediately noticed the vector traced sample was horrible quality. The below image on left shows my original digital rough sample I did with shading. On the right is the vector file which shows harsh lines and shapes on the shaded areas instead of smooth transitions.

So I determined the best way to end up with a good vector was to do the original digital art with flat colors. This in the end  feel also lead to a better logo overall anyway as it simplified all of the forms and colors to the basics.

For those unfamiliar with vector files. Basically typical images are in pixel based formats which use small dots/pixels to display the image. Vector uses mathematical equations in the form of shapes of color to display images. So vector files are easily scalable without losing any of the quality. This logo as a vector file can now be enlarged as much as the client wants and it will keep its sharp lines. Pixel based images get blurry as they are enlarged.

Sending out Mailers

Somehow I've managed to go three to four years without sending out any mailer postcards to publishers.  Well today is the day I broke with that trend and finally sent out seven envelopes filled with some of my more recent work. During senior year of College we were taught the importance of postcards and even more the importance of meeting with art directors in person in order to contract work.

 When I graduated college I suppose I had hi hopes that I would be lucky enough to catch the eye of some big name publisher and have it made. I didn't have a clue. I purchased one thousand!!!!! postcards for three different illustrations and I fully intended to send them all out to publishers in an effort known as mass mailing. It wasn't until years later that I realized how completely misguided my attempts were as I began to see how bad my art was waay back then. I think I sent out about 150 postcards before realizing the impossible task i had before me. The rest were eventually thrown away.

       About a year later, I sent another round of postcards with artwork much better geared towards the children's book market. Eventually I began to realize that I needed to dig in and get my hands dirty actually making art and learning the specific field of children's illustration. At MassArt I had learned the basics of color theory and composition or how to paint nudes but I learned nothing about how to draw kids, how to design images to have room for text, or how to design characters that would remain recognizable from one pose to the next. These among other things I had to struggle to learn on my own over the past five years.

     Soon after college I got a job to do a children's cd cover and got paid very decently. Then I found a logo gig and then another cd cover. This second cd cover turned into a job to do a full children's book! This to date is still my best paying job I've had in the life of my career. I did fully appreciate the job at the time but I suppose if I had known the full extent of what was to meet me in the following years, I would have found an even deeper level of appreciation for those clients who gave me my first real shot in children's illustration. From that point forward I worked for various clients full time and mailer postcards and the idea of working for publishers became a thing of the past. I illustrated eight children's books with three of those still not published and I currently have one more book on the way to the printers and two more in the process of being illustrated. I learned a ton of behind the scenes technical details about self publishing and at times I became a jack of all trades, master of none. I never really did figure out how to market books with no money to start off with.

     So that was my five year goal since graduating. I planned to get books published and to build a large body of work that I could eventually feel proud to  show off to publishers. Now at the five year point I'm taking a good hard look back over my short career and am very thankful for all of my clients. However I now look forward to the future and realize that some seriously big changes need to come into play if I expect to still be working as a full time illustrator. So these seven packages of postcards are just the beginning of what I expect to be a long trying period of marketing directly to those who have the ability to keep me in business, as I embark on the journey of marriage and eventually delve into the adventure of starting a family.

      I decided to start with magazines as they are the easiest market to break into. They are much more willing to try their hand with new talent because it won't make or break them if the illustrations don't turn out exactly as planned. In preparation for these mailers I finally went back and redid my resume and uploaded, to my website, about twenty new images from the past year. www.matthewgauvin.com I've got plenty of work left to do but today was an excellent start and I'm quit excited to discover what the future has in store!

Cobblestone Magazine 2: Frederick law Olmsted

Yesterday I finally finished my second batch of illustrations for Cobblestone Magazine and they were approved!

This being a history magazine, each image comes with it's own hidden challenges and research not always evident on the surface. With this first image you might expect it was simple matter of  going out to my back yard and taking  a couple pictures of the trees and woods since I live in Vermont. While this image didn't require a ton of research for historical aspects it did take some time in the thumbnail sketch and developement stage. For one thing the boy needed to at least resemble his older self in the next couple of images. The hardest part for this was trying to design an image which shows the boy out  in the woods while still leaving an area of smooth color for the text. I considered various options and finally envisioned this solution. I did do quit a bit of research for the following two images though and during that process I discovered that Olmsted helped design The back bay fens in Boston. I then remembered one of my favorite trees from that park when I lived in Boston. I still have pictures of it and did a finished drawing and painting of it for class assignments at Mass Art. So since this series is about Fredrick Law Olmsted I figured it would be the perfect Chance to paint this tree once again. I'm sure you can guess which tree it is.

This next image was probably the toughest of the three simply because the topic didn't seem to have a whole lot of reference material readily available. My task was to portray Olmsted as an accountant/ Office aapprentice around 1840. I looked into the sort of clothing he would be wearing, I searched through a gazillion old office photos, I looked into the sorts of writing utensils in use, I even did some searching on what sorts of lighting and other office equipment might be visible in the piece. Again I had difficulty in designing this scene in which there was such a large chunk of text.

This final image required perhaps the most research while I suppose has less of that evident in the final image. My task was to illustrate Olmsted on his farm where he began to learn the art of landscape design. I researched the house and the land and had a look at various species of trees, clothing from the period etc. In the end I used artistic licence a great deal in the layout of the land as there was soo little to go on without actually visiting this property in NY. I would say the key element I did research for is the barn which the art director had me take out of the piece. I had a couple of books on hand about American barns and went to work reading about various styles and purposes. I read about how some barns in New England had roofs sloped at a good angle to allow the snow to stay on the roof and hence insulate the barn in the winter. I learned that painted barns start to appear in America in the late 1700's. Also that painted barns started in Virginia with gray toned paint while the more northerly barns moved in the direction of red. There are various theories for this. I find it interesting with Historical illustration how much behind the scenes research happens without ever being evident in the final pieces. There is a great deal of difference between illustrating the sentence, "The farmer worked on his farm" and  the sentence " Frederick Law Olmsted worked on his farm in his early twenties". Overall I enjoyed my second round with the art director at Cobblestone and hope to eventually have time to work on another with them should they invite me back for a third course in history!

American Milking Devon Bull

  
Over the past few weeks I started work on my second assignment for The American Milking Devon Cattle Association.  I did some finished drawings and oil illustrations of the cows last year. This year they need illustrations of the Bull. The ones along the bottom are from last year and along the top are what I have so far for this year. I'll likely still need to make changes before going to finals.

As you can see, the bulls have more muscle on them, their heads are bulkier, their horns are designed more for damage than for elegance and their legs are wider and stronger. The females have a large pouch to hold the milk while the bulls . . . do not.

          My main art director while working on these is the farmer who got me the gig in the first place. He's a large part of the association and knows Devon cattle and bulls like the back of his hand along with many other subjects that he's been involved in over the years. He's owned a number of businesses and has spent hours on end telling me of stories from his life. When I told him about my girlfriend he immediately rambled off "Women are a kingdom, men are a fool, take away his senses and wear away his jewels". The pic below is one I just realized I accidentally caught of him in the background as I was taking pictures of the bull. I wanted to do a sketch of him while he talked but I'm still a bit too shy for that.

He went on to tell me why the bulls have such wide legs, making sure I made them strong and straight like a piano. He wanted the neck long to indicate a healthy beast that could reach the grass, Strong necks, heavy brisket, and he had me move the horns up. I think the horns will still need lots of work to get them looking big, powerful and heading in the exact right direction. I've found the horns to be the most difficult part to illustrate on both versions. I even made a clay model to try helping with that. From this angle the horns would be in a  weird position in which the horns fold back over themselves but it doesn't look good when I draw it that way.  I must have spent over an hour on the horns alone. So I may need to go have a better look at the bulls from various angles in person now that they are outside of the barn. Wish me luck!

Overwhelmed With Joy

This past month and particularly the past week has been extremely busy. So I really haven't found the time to do much for this blog. I have six projects going at the moment so I have more than enough new work to show but no time to put it in blog form. It's been probably over a year since I've updated my website. I'll get to that eventually I'm sure. This past week alone I worked on my various projects, went to Boston to do a PowerPoint presentation for the senior illustration class at Mass. college of Art and Design, helped my brother knights of Columbus with a fish fry for lent, bible study, a young adult group holy hour and gathering and topped the week off by proposing to my girlfriend. SHe said yes!!!! Just now I began to realize how cool it will be to finally get to add a particular line to the end of my bio about how "Matthew Gauvin lives in Vermont with his beautiful wife . . . ".

        Now I'm finding it particularly difficult to get back to work as the temperatures soar to 70 and 80 degrees for the first time this year, I dug two stuck cars out of the muddy driveway yesterday, I've spent time writing to and talking to friends and family about the engagement, and I just have this overall feeling of excitement and joy wanting to be out basking in all of the warm graces God has been showering over my life. Yes it's true I have summer fever but it's Ooooh so much more than that! I want to build gardens and journey along new paths, walk in the sun and splash in the rain puddles, shoot my bow in the backyard while BBQing ribs on the grill and knocking back a cold one. Summer is here folks! and what a great summer it's shaping up to be. Thanks to all who have stopped by the blog, commented, read, shared, or in any way participated in this blog.

    In the near future I hope to show my progress on the BBQ logo, show some finished work from my recent children's book, show some new bull illustrations, BW's from my new chapter book, sketches and final art for my new Cobblestone assignment, and I've been meaning to get to all kinds of other blog post ideas I've had in mind for some time.

Cobblestone Magazine : Two

Click on the link below to see a previous post I did for this series of illustrations for Cobblestone Magazine. In that post I showed my final sketches and final art and talked about my research process.
Sketches

I was just about to get back to work today after lunch when I saw the UPS truck coming up the driveway. I wasn't expecting anything so didn't get my hopes up. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a couple of complimentary copies of the issue of "Cobbleston Magazine" that I had done three illustrations for. SOooooooo Excited as I thought I would have to order my own copies.