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:

In the final installment of the Underworld Trilogy by Jennifer Nielsen, Elliot joins forces with all the underworld creatures to battle Kovol the demon once and for all. I’m working on the interiors now, but the cover is done…and here it is:

The conclusion of the trilogy! Battle royale! Elliot and his adversaries from the first two books unite in final confrontation with Kovol the demon. Since Kovol was prominently featured on the cover of book 2 I didn’t want to show him again here. I also wanted to convey the epic, cast-of-many aspect of this book and to show a slightly more mature and confident Elliot. To avoid the final piece being too busy I will use the light of the glowing broom (hard to explain, you’ll have to read the book!) to keep focus on the main character. I intend to show the progress of this illustration as it comes together over the next couple weeks…P.S.: please ignore the highly suspect anatomy in this sketch. I’ll be sure to work on that…

Here is the second sneak at the second book in  Jennifer Nielsen’s Elliot series. This one features the same demon that features prominently on the cover. For this picture I took some inspiration from some of my favorite old sci-fi and sword & sorcery illustrators and cartoonists, such as Frazetta and Wally Wood.  I lost some of the motion and drama that was in my first sketch (which I’ll post tomorrow), but it still looks pretty good I think.