Monday, January 14, 2013

A Pickled Peck of Projects




These are some illustrations for nursery rhymes. They'll be printed in the book Over the Hills and Far Away, which will be published by Seven Stories (the National Centre for Childrens Books), and Frances Lincoln Children's Publishers.





They were done entirely digitally, but I'm posting scans from Giclee prints I made.
Using a Cintiq I'm finding that I can create marks and free-flowing drawings that I'm quite happy with, directly on the computer. The colours are great too, but the images often end up looking as though I did them much larger and reduced them down. I think this is mostly because of the relatively low resolution of a Cintiq screen compared to print - and that I get obsessed with the close-up quality of the mark making.


(My dad is called Peter and he is a Piper, so I couldn't resist).


(Photo by my brother Leo Glaister)

For other work (those below are for something I might reveal later) I'm still experimenting with working with real paint, ink, pastels, and pencils on top of prints on uncoated watercolour paper.




There's nothing like the tactile feedback and unexpectedness of real materials (gouache is brilliant but also SO annoying though!) But as soon as any book or project gets at all stressful or large I'm sure I'll be back behind the computer for the most part...



4 comments:

Anonymous said...

This may be the first ever appearance of a bellows blown bagpipe in a children's book...
yer dad

Michael Blackman said...

the digital images look fantastic Joel. looking at them, the sizes they are, you cannot tell the difference.

Joel Stewart said...

Thanks Michael. It's slightly more evident in print. But the issue is more about how long I spend obsessing over the quality of digital marks compared to how often I bugger them up by hand...

Roger Simó said...

Beautiful pictures, I thought they are done by hand...