I love how she acts out the poses of the various characters, and that she thinks the kid with all the dinosaurs is Milo!

Helen & Linda Reading Dino Pets Go To School

Ok, these are the last pictures from this book that I’ll be posting (at least until April when the book comes out). I’m moving on to other things next week but first I wanted to show some of the smaller images. Looking back at book 2, I think I was overly tight which was especially noticeable in the spots. I tried to be a little looser with these but still gave in to obsessiveness here and there. That said, here are three of the better ones:

Mayhem on a large scale in a small space. This one reminded of me of some of the design work for CODENAME: Kids Next Door.

An underworld brownie home.

I was particularly pleased with the beefiness of this kid’s chin and fingers. I also had fun rendering the bagful of earwax.

Next week I’ll move on to posting some other kinds of things, but I wanted to show a couple more of these…mostly because I had so much fun doing them! The challenge of this one was that the premise was very similar to a picture from the previous book and I wanted to be sure to make them distinct from each other. So, I simply reversed the camera angle which also cut down on the amount of detail I had to put in. The detail, of course, is where the fun is but it is also where I’d go broke if I don’t restrain myself. The budget for these books is not great and if I were to spend more than a full day on any of these pictures my rate of pay would go from modest to miserable. Anyway…enough griping. Here’s the image along with the one from the previous book for comparison:

In looking back at the illustrations for the previous books I felt that I had a tendency to create claustrophobic spaces. I think I’ve always had this inclination, in all the various styles and applications of my artwork, to both fill up all the space with stuff and also to not vary the tonal range as much as I could, resulting in a flattening of space despite my best attempts at dynamic perspective in my compositions. I really had to force myself to keep the background of this image as light as it ended up. The compulsion to darken the outlines was nearly impossible to resist but I’m really glad I did. Can I do this more often in the future? I hope so.

Elliot enters a cave to find that all the underworld creatures have been frozen…

The challenge with this one was to create multiple levels of space for depth and also to have all the creatures appear frozen without the poses and composition looking stiff. I fussed with the lighting and the opacity of the linework on the various layers endlessly.

A spot illo of Fidget and Hagatha:

I shall attempt to rebound from another blog posting dry spell with a renewed fervor. Funny how its at the times that I’m producing the most work that I don’t post…because I’m too overwhelmed doing the work. Anyway, I just finished the interior illustrations for Elliot & The Last Underworld War, the third and installment in the series by Jennifer Nielsen. There were 30 interior illustrations in all, and as with the first two books, I had a lot of fun making them. This week I’ll be posting my favorites, starting with this one of Elliot falling out of a tree while Fidget the Pixie looks on and laughs:

Here’s another image from Dino Pets Go To School

On Saturday November 5th I’ll be signing copies at the world-famous Books of Wonder, also in Manhattan, from 12-2pm.

Here is a recent review from Booklist:

The humor that results from giant dinosaurs in everyday settings never seems to go extinct. Here, it’s Pet Day at school, and most kids bring in quotidian creatures, such as a guinea pig or dog. But one kid brings his dinos, each of which wreaks a different kind of havoc. When the tallest one “sits on the bus,” it literally sits on top of the bus; the smartest one eats the students’ math quizzes; and so on. A chart at the back of the book identifies each kind of dinosaur, first by how it is described in the narrative, then by its scientific name. Colorful illustrations realistically portray the school setting, which makes the dinosaurs’ ridiculous antics even funnier in contrast.

— Diane Foote