The Shahnameh - Sam's Dream

Another illustration from this story. Here Sam dreams a second night and is tormented and ashamed by what he is shown.

Making a Picture - My Process

I am going back a bit to my old style of illustrating from when I was in fashion. I am bringing that look - to children's books, and well all of my illustration work, I think. I think I am really finding my confidence and voice again, which is more painterly than I had been going for since I began working digitally. But I am really pleased, and find it so much easier to paint this way. It kind of boggles my mind that I hadn't worked like this before, but I think it has something to do with finding the right tool in my software program for creating the soft outline that I like, and the translucent paint look. It is one tool that does it all, which is kind of amazing.

Today, while drawing this piece below, I met a young girl named Mia at the Starbucks who took an interest in my work and wanted to know how I did it. So, I thought I'd share with you, what I shared with her. This was completely drawn from beginning to end using Manga Studio on an HP Touchsmart TM 2050 Tablet Computer, in about 5 hours.

The first image is my rough sketch which actually is a combination of 2 rough sketches, background and foreground, that I merged together. The basic layout and some loose detail is seen.

Once I have the rough layout that I like, and more or less the expression that I am looking for, I am ready to trace over this on another layer, making my lines as soft and as clean as possible.  I much prefer this softer line, than the harder ink line I had been using before. I had always used pencils and pencil crayons for my lines pre-digital days. This has the same look. (Some areas were erased for the final compilation, and some areas were mistakenly coloured, I forget to switch layers sometimes :-P

 The next image is the painting/color layer. I don't really know what to say. I just start coloring. I use the pencil tool and play with it's natural transparency getting a layered coloring effect.

I then begin adding shading in various hues. 1st layer of light shading

 Then the 2nd, darker layer of shading more uniform in hue just to get it to pop a bit more, brings it to the final painting below.

The Shahnameh

The Shahnameh (The Book of Kings) is considered the great Persian epic. I haven't read all of Ferdowsi's epic, however I have read about half of it so far, and I particularly enjoyed the story of Zal and the story of his son, Rostam. I have begun doing some illustrations for it. Here are a couple of them. The first one I think I need to redo. These are details of the full image. To see both full images go to the Children's Book section under Illustrations. Stay tuned for more images from this epic.

Here, Zal is taken to the highest mountain and abandoned by his father for being Albino. His cries are heard by the great creature the Simorgh, who takes pity on him and raises him as her own. The following picture, Zal is shown experiencing his childhood with the Simorgh.