Another image for my Alice Project. The coloured background is for online display only. The book will have a black and white interior.

This is when Alice is leading the animals ashore (and not mentioning that it's her pool of tears they're swimming in). I'll probably crop this for the book.

Illustrator CS3, 3 hours, 43 minutes. I used a gradient mesh for the top of the water, along with some feathering of some spots in the water.

I'm aware that her hair seems a bit lopsided, but she strikes me as a girl who moves a lot. Even when treading water and talking to the animals, she's probably moving around to face whomever she's speaking to (which explains the placement of her hair).

Pose reference used for head to waist. It's near impossible to find pictures of people swimming like this, so I approximated the legs.

Enjoy :)

Labels: alice project, illustration, vector

As I mentioned recently, I've been working on an image of Alice looking into the garden for my Alice Project. You can see Alice alone in my "Alice Looking In" art post.

Here's the composite image with the garden (click the image to enlarge):

My timer wasn't on while I drew the garden, but I estimate that it took near 10 hours to complete because of all the details and tweaking. The roses, topiaries, arches, pointy trees, and columns are original symbols that I created. The scattered leaves and sand were default symbols that I re-coloured.

I realize the leaves look kind of shiny on screen, but the highlights will be more subtle in print. I still need to convert the garden to greyscale and crop the image to add it to my Alice Project book. It was nice to work in colour this time, and it gets me thinking about possibilities for the book cover.

I will be formatting this image to sell as prints over on RedBubble. When it's available for purchase, I'll mention it here. Enjoy :)

Labels: alice project, illustration, vector

I've just finished this illustration of Alice, this time creating black and white as well as colour versions. You can see the progress below from sketch to greyscale digital, to colour digital. I made some changes to Alice's hair for the digital, for consistency with my character design. I also added teeth in the digital.

Time for the digital was just under three hours, with about 20 minutes extra for changing from greyscale to colour (I re-coloured with live paint, not live color).

For my Alice Project, this illustration will be obscured with the garden in front. This was an interesting pose, and I was a little concerned about making sure Alice looked childish enough, and not too curvy in her hips. I think it turned out pretty well, and I really liked adding colour to this one. Alice is a very vibrant and expressive character, so she's a lot of fun to draw. I think that colour only enhances her.

I hope you enjoy the images.

Labels: alice project, illustration, sketches, vector

I've been working on and off on a personal project for a while that I've been referring to as "The Alice Project." It's a short booklet featuring excerpts from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland accompanied by my original illustrations. The interior pages will be black and white, and I'm planning for a colour cover. When it's finished, I'll be selling printed books as well as e-books.

Part of the reason I started the project was to have another multi-page piece to add to my portfolio. This project allows me to show my abilities as a designer as well as an illustrator. It's a challenging project, and I will be using reference for the majority of the illustrations. I'm also using this project as a means to be more adventurous with my pose and angle choices for figures.

The following are my drawings of Alice for the first chapter, I hope you enjoy them.

Labels: alice project, illustration, vector