My Digital Brushes Now Available!

My Digital Brush sets for Procreate 5 (iPad) and Paintstorm Studio (iPad and Windows/Mac) are now available at: www.gumroad.com/joelstewart

Hello?

Two years without a post. Head over to instagram I do post there...

Tiny Dinosaurs

My new picture book Tiny Dinosaurs is out in the world at last.

Some really appreciative reviews have come in already!

The Guardian

Read It Daddy

Red Reading Hub

Chopsy Baby

News

Well, just as I worked up the energy to make another go of this blog the world decided to become really alarming and I didn’t much feel like poking my head out. Also there was just a lot of work to do on the studio etc.

So, news:

I have some original artwork and prints for sale at www.childrensbookillustration.com Several pieces from Addis Berner Bear Forgets (I’m told two of these are sold already, but there’s at least one left and there may be more available soon), some small pieces from Tiny Cops and Robbers, some illustrations from Peter Pan, and some prints with hand-painted elements (it’s the Donkey print seen in a post below this one) that are development work I’m doing for a new picture book.

It Wasn’t Me (I Was Nowhere Near It) by Michael Bond (!) with illustrations and cover by me has been published in the UK.

I finished the artwork and text for a new picture book called Tiny Dinosaurs, which will be published next year by OUP. This was the first book I’ve drawn entirely with an Apple Pencil and it was mostly a great experience.

There will be a new edition of The Magic Paintbrush by Julia Donaldson out next year. Since I drew the illustrations more than fifteen years ago, I took this opportunity to adjust quite a bit of the artwork inside and on the cover. I think it is greatly improved and hopefully I haven’t done a George Lucas on the book!

Also the studio is sort of ready, or at least it has desks and work stuff in it!

Lifeboat Illustration Auction

Illustrator/Author Emily Gravett has arranged The Lifeboat Illustration Auction in support of The Schoolbus Project. 

There are loads of great pieces up for grabs. Mine is a ltd edition print with painted details (a new technique I've been working on). It is lot 30.

Limited Edition Jabberwocky Prints Available Now!

Limited edition, high quality giclee prints of my illustrations for Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky are available now from ElizasMarket.com

I made these illustrations fourteen or fifteen years ago, but I'm still fond of many of them!

Tiny Cops and Robbers. Available Now!

My new picture book Tiny Cops and Robbers is out now, published by OUP!

Apple Pencil

Here's a picture of David Hockney's Dachshund that I did using Apple pencil on a 12.9" iPad Pro in the app ProCreate.

I said I’d write some reviews and stuff about working with the Apple Pencil didn’t I? Well, I’ve been too busy learning software and building brushes and experimenting to get very far with that. But I have been spending quite a bit of time on forums for the two best pieces of software for the iPad, namely ProCreate and the more powerful, but for the moment frustratingly unstable Paintstorm Studio. I’m mostly on these forums to learn and to lobby for updates and features that I think are important, but I recently wrote this and realised that it sums up, better than I have been able before, a lot of how I feel about working digitally: 

“I strongly believe that one of the main reasons that real media still appear more expressive and individual than digital media is in the subtleness of mark-making. The more small variables that tilt, pressure, and speed of mark making control, then the more of the tiny decisions and quirks of personality and movement that make a person's art different from another's shine through.

That's not to encourage people to be luddite about the fantastic things digital can achieve, and help them to smooth out or to emulate other people's marks if that's what they want. But artists using real pencils are essentially laying down layers of graphene when they draw -one of the thinnest materials known to man. The miracle of drawing is that a person can control this and express so much. 

It's clear that the Apple Pencil is capable of getting closer to this level of expressiveness than any other digital tool, but when the software (and hardware -the more complex the brushes get) imposes limits it's frustrating! As a professional I have always used a lot of digital because of the control I need to meet deadlines, but I've always missed the subtlety of real media, and often returned to scanned art composited in Photoshop.”

What I was referring to about limits is that ProCreate currently lacks useful controls over tilt and 'dual brush' functions. Paintstorm Studio allows most of this to be controlled -and makes amazing brushes possible, but it is rather glitchy.

Here's a quick demo of a couple of brushes that I created in Paintstorm Studio:

I’m not kidding about how close the Apple Pencil gets to the subtleties of drawing on real paper. Paintstorm Studio allows the user (with a pretty steep learning curve and no real instructions) to see that nearly every variable that is available in a real paintbrush or pencil is there. It’s a bit of an uncanny feeling -but you get over it. There are also several workflow problems with saving and sending files but I don’t think they’ll be around for long.

Take a look around three minutes into this video:

I predict that it’ll only be matter of a few years or less before there is software and hardware available for drawing and painting that can model most real media properly -using fluid dynamics and maybe even gravity modelling (tip the iPad and have digital watercolour drip down the ‘page’ collecting suspended pigment in the indentations of a modelled texture). At the moment you really need to have quite a lot of experience with real paper and paint to get ‘realistic’ effects digitally (which I think leads to some great work in itself -work that is comfortable with it's digitalness -and also some really hideous stuff). I wonder what it will be like when you don’t. On the one hand Total Drawing Freedom! On the other hand Agggh! It’s The Semiotic Matrix! 

Meanwhile in my humble matrix I've been working out artwork styles for my next picture book and drawing a lot of squiggles to try to make satisfying brushes in both ProCreate and Paintstorm Studio.

(I've made so many, particularly in Paintstorm, that I'm wondering about putting some up for sale. Any interest in that? I feel weirdly protective of them -and at the same time that's probably nonsense.)

Despite going horribly over-complicated about brushes, I hope it's clear that I'm really going for simplicity when it comes to the drawings themselves!

[Btw. I've also done some published drawings where I did the linework on the iPad and then finished them on paper but I'll do a separate post about those.]

Drawn with custom brushes (and overlaid textures) in ProCreate:

Drawn with custom brushes (and sometimes overlaid textures) in Paintstorm Studio:

Tumbleweed

My Instagram seems to be the main place where I'm showing new work and sketches these days, so best head there for more up to date stuff.

I'm hoping to return here to post some reviews and process videos perhaps, detailing particularly my attempts to work with the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro. It is hard to find the time to make and edit these things though.

A semi-sequel to Tiny Cops and Robbers is in the works for OUP Childrens Books, and some of that work should emerge soon as well as various black and white and cover drawings for older fiction.

Tiny Cops and Robbers!

At last! This is the cover of my new picture book Tiny Cops and Robbers. For one reason and another it has been a long time coming together, particularly as on the surface it seems such a simple idea, but here it is! I'm very proud of it. It will be published next year by OUP. More news on this book soon.

I've also just finished some black and white drawings for Peter Pan and Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. This book will be published later this year (I think) by Alma Books.

And I built a banjo! It's been a great way to fill in the times when I would otherwise have been panicked about this and that in my picture book work (most illustrators will explain that we're a bunch of worriers, on the whole). Learning to use this or that tool or technique and sawing stuff up in the shed has been an adventure and I've got lots of plans for more and other instruments. I've always tinkered with instruments and the only strange thing is why I haven't begun building them properly before now.

Merry Christmas!

After a very slow-going year, in work and also on this blog, I suddenly have a million deadlines to meet, so this is the closest most people are going to be getting to a christmas card from me. Sorry about that!

Corners

I keep wanting to show what I'm working on, but all I can show are the tiniest corners without giving the story away.

But look, real paints! For the moment anyway.

Addis Back in Town

This great big poster from my book Addis Berner Bear Forgets is currently proudly adorning the hoarding alongside the street that leads from Kings Cross station to The House of Illustration at 2 Granary Sq. It's in excellent company as you can see here. Obviously it's a great honour for me, and especially nice as I am currently revisiting some of the techniques I used to make this book.

The House of Illustration opens on the 2nd of July, and Quentin Blake is interviewed about it in the FT here.

Proofs...

...are in for The Cow Jumped Over the Moon, A Nursery Emergency, by Jeanne Willis.

It's interesting (to me) how much these illustrations hark back to the earliest books I ever did. This is partly to do with the text, partly to do with digital techniques I've developed that happened emulate those early colours and mark-making, and maybe also to do with the sense of starting to make picture books again after several years away making The Adventures of Abney and Teal. 

This book will be out until early next year I think, but there are two new Abney and Teal activity books, with pictures by Davide Arnone and me, available now.

Currently I'm working on ways to mix more direct black-line drawings with all sorts of different techniques to try to make some work that is as direct as the drawings, and perhaps a bit more contemporary looking. I've got a picture book that is hopefully ready for final art soon, and some new stories and characters brewing for slightly older readers.

More recent experiments are on tumblr.

Also, big news since I have represented myself for the last fourteen years, I have signed with the great Jodie Hodges at United Agents, and am open to illustration commissions, especially black and white or two-colour work for fiction.

Nursery Rhyme Emergency

Here's a peek at some of the finished artworks for The Cow Jumped Over the moon (A Nursery Rhyme Emergency) by Jeanne Willis. I've been working on these, off and on, for almost a year and a half and now they are all finished (well, even now there might be a small change but I have to draw the line somewhere!)

It will be published by Walker Books next year.






Now I'm concentrating on another picture book which I've been working on for about the same length of time. Honestly, I'm actually pretty fast when it comes to illustrating, but for this one the writing duties are mine too, and what seemed like a beautifully simple idea is still proving really difficult to get into a straight line.

I'm tinkering with some ideas for longer illustrated fiction again, but that's sure to be a slow burner even by the standards demonstrated above.



I'm also still posting up general sketches and experiments, but they're going straight onto my tumblr here. As of about a month ago it is all new stuff there, but as an archive it goes back about five years.