©DON TATE
ILLUSTRATION
Painting the final art
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I create the final artwork using acrylic paint on textured paper. I normally use Golden acrylics but I will also use Liquitex in a pinch. What's the difference? I don't know but the people at the art supply store boast Golden to be the best midrange brand.
I have the sketches transferred to paper at Miller Blueprint. I have chosen a tan colored paper and coated it with a sienna oil wash. I also do an oil underpainting to establish the dark tones from the light tones. I like how acrylic feels over oil, which I know some artist would argue against. Lean over fat, or something like that, is a painters no-no.
I started out painting the first story making the same mistake I always seem to make when approaching a book. I completely painted the the sky, the clouds, the landforms and all the background environment. Then I completely painted the foreground elements, the animals, their clothes and all the other details. The mistake is that now I have a great looking background and a great looking foreground -- that don't balance. All the pros will advise working the entire picture all at once. I should have laid down my base colors, background, foreground, everything being careful to balance my colors and values together at this early stage. So these first few paintings required some reworking to get all the elements to balance.
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Painting took about six months and keep in mind that I do this in addition to my full-time job. My other books have taken about 3 to 5 months. This book also required more illustrations than past books. SURE AS SUNRISE is 48 pages, 5 double-page spread illustrations, 14 single page illustrations, 3 spots plus a cover.
I normally work in batches of about 5 to six paintings at a time. I was advised by another illustrator to work all the paintings in a book at the same time, for consistency sake. I'd never be able to do that. I need to see that I am making some progress each day, and I need to actually finish some paintings along the way or I'd go crazy. Any more than 6 paintings at a time would overwhelm me. What I try to do is paint scenes that use basically the same color pallet. With SURE AS SUNRISE, I painted one story at a time with each story taking about a month.
The computer along with the digital camera has dramatically changed how I paint a book. Several times throughout a painting, take a digital snapshot and load it onto my computer. Using Photoshop, I can experiment with values and change colors without actually changing my painting. Once I'm happy with the adjustments on the computer, I can make the same adjustments to my painting. I also continue to make quick clay models of the characters as I'm painting, adjusting lighting and using the digital images as reference to paint from. I used to sort of do this with my 35mm camera or an instamatic. Both those methods were expensive(I didn't realize at the time) and I'd sometimes go through hundreds of dollars in photo processing per book. With the exception of the electricity it took to run my computer, I spent nothing on photo processing for this book. Wish I could say the same about the enormous expense of paints and brushes.