Painted wood

Here are a couple of the painted plywood pieces, I started to add acrylic with the gouache because the wood seemed to drink up the gouache and I wanted a little more definition. The subjects are a couple of more obscure plastic figurines in my studio. This is our 100th post!

New projects

This summer I've been working with flexible easy cut blocks. I like using the reduction technique because you only need one block per image, and if I plan my design out properly, I can still make one color prints with the finished block (the black layer). These three images of locally found sea creatures will be matted and framed into a triptych. I used Speedball water based inks and block printing paper for these 4" x 4" images.

Recent Project

Here is a sketch I did for a recent project. The painting is completed but I will post that at a later date. The setting is Brazil.

Well, what was is it they said about that famous road that's paved with good intentions?

I had tons of them regarding how much I'd get done this summer!
Five rooms -all under construction (that we're doing ourselves) has not left me a moment for summer illustrating. Instead, I'm surrounded by walls of boxes as they return from our rented storage space to be sorted and ut into place.
I'm boxed in.
The good news is that soon, my daughter's murals will be done and I will finally have a new art room for illustrating, costume design and painting/sculpting!
This sketch is from my spring book dummy and pretty much captures what I'm doing right now.

copyright Angela Lucido 4/2010
It's a race to the finish-the first of September !
Happy Last Breath of Summer, All!-Angela Lucido

Blast from the past....

While going through a large old portfolio case of artwork in the back of my closet, I recently came across the sketches I did for New Hampshire Healthy Kids. Back in 2007 I illustrated their annual report - the cover and all inside pages... it was a great project and they were wonderful to work with. That year's theme was an amusement park, and for the cover they wanted a rollercoaster and lots of different amusement park scenes going on in the background. I did up 3 sketches for the cover - all very similar, just compositionally different. Thank goodness for tracing paper and my scanner. Take a look!

When Illustrations Become 3-D...

As some of you may know, I work full time as a graphic illustrator for a company in MA. We create all the graphics for items sold at college bookstores. If an item has a college name on it, chances are we had a hand in creating it! (Unless it's clothing.)
Anyway, few months ago, I had to design a dragon bobblehead from scratch for Suny College Cortland. Below is my design (created in Illustrator with the company info blurred out):

I thought I'd never see the thing again...until yesterday when a sample showed up at our office! It was soooo weird to see the factory's 3-D translation of my drawing. My coworker helped me hastily take photos of it on her iPhone before we had to ship it out to the customer for approval. I thought I'd share the outcome:



Kind of weird and cool!

Sketches

Yup. I'm working on sketches again.  This time I'm working on some for a dummy I'm starting to put together.  These are in the very early stages, so you'll notice loads of erasure marks, and stray pencil marks. I will clean them up, but at this stage I'm just trying to get the characters right.  This is my favorite part of the process.  I love sketching characters!

Painting on wood

This is just a random image of a stack of plywood but the grain is similar to the wood I am using. At our last Smalls Like Crayons meeting Ann Marie showed us her wood paintings and it got me curious. I am on vacation right now and brought some 8"x8" boards to paint on and am loving how the wood grain shows through the gouache. I'll show you a finished piece next time it is my turn.

Dog Days

We are getting to the middle of August and into those "dog days" of summer. As a teacher, I am especially aware of the waning days of summer vacation! Still, it's a great time to enjoy fresh corn on the cob, the slightly warmer ocean temperatures, and vine ripened tomatoes!

Thanks to the folks at www.welovetoillustrate.com for this new illustration topic for August. Visit them to add your own "dog days" post.

Sharing a Couple of Things

I have been testing out colors for a project I am working on. While doing this I got a phone call from my son and I kept painting around my little experiments while I talked with him. I find the process of these so enjoyable and as I may have mentioned previously, my goal is to have my finished work be closer in feeling to my experimental stuff. I think of these painted sketches as warm-ups before I start a project. What do you do as a warm-up?

On another topic, last night I had a meeting with my Smells Like Crayons group. One cool thing about these meetings is that we share pertinent info about the world of illustration. I thought I would share a little gem with you fellow illustrators out there. Michelle told us about The Sketchbook Project. You can enter for $25 and you receive a Moleskine book which you fill according to one of the themes listed on the site. Then your book becomes part of the Brooklyn Art Library's permanent collection with a unique bar code and everything. These sketchbooks get to tour the US and will be exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the country. If you want to do it for this go around, the deadline to submit your completed sketchbook is January 15, 2011. If you decide to do it, it would be great to hear from you!

Robots

Here are some of the sketches I did in preparation for this past week's Illustration Friday theme of "Artificial". You can see the finished piece here.

And the Winner is...

On Monday, I posted a book review and had a giveaway of the book, Said the Kitty to the Cat. I had my daughter pull a name and Michelle's was chosen. Congratulations, Michelle!!!