Little Red & Big Bad In the Colourful Woods

Coloured in briskly today. Not a bad effort considering I have a post St Patrick's Day "head".

Little Red & Big Bad In the Woods

(Wacom tablet in Photoshop)

A companion piece to this illustration from last year. Here we see Mr Wolf getting to know his lunch...

Little Red Riding Hood - Finished!

It's a kids' illustration for grown-ups, really, isn't it? Ah well. I'll do something a little cuddlier next time to balance it all out. In fact, no... I'm going to do a cuddly version of this very piece, and stick 'em side by side...

Little Red Riding Hood Process (Snapshot 3)

Finally got around to doing some more; at this stage it's not a million miles away from being done and dusted.
I've had my Vermeer book close to hand throughout. I love Vermeer. What an artist.

Little Red Riding Hood Process (Snapshot 2)

God, I didn't half go on yesterday.

Did a couple more hours this afternoon. It's maybe looking a bit dark and heavy handed, but once we've got some sunlight pouring into that room in the back, things should look a little less bleak. Looking forward to a proper session on it tomorrow...

Little Red Riding Hood Process (Snapshot 1)

Prior to going digital, I was sort of a "proper" painter - that is to say I used paints and brushes to knock up a colour illustration. As satisfying as this was, I was absolutely foaming at the mouth to get hold of a Mac, dive into Photoshop and splash about in all those lovely flat colours and gradients... Mmm! It seemed exotic and modern. I wanted modern.

I even did a spot of "proper" painting to kick things off when I finally arrived in the brave new digital age, until discovering to my wonder and delight the joys of masks,filters and blending modes, and the unexpected new colours and visual fireworks that five minutes of casual messing about with these functions can kick up. I forgot all about "proper" painting pretty bloody quickly.

Anyway, I noticed a couple of obvious and important things recently. Firstly, there are a load of artists out there producing beautiful "proper" - and distinctive - painted work in Photoshop. Secondly, far too much of my own digital output, bold and colourful as it may have been, has been a tad sterile. I'm talking about drawings produced as a halfhearted framework for gratuitous Photoshoppery.. a lazy approach to texture and values.. and in some cases a mind boggling skyscraper of Nothing sat there in the layers palette - you know, all "opacity this" and "colour burn" that, over and over again, somehow failing to achieve half as much as it should do on account of the lack of substance underpinning it.

Ha, look at the silly illustrator beating himself up. So! The idea with this new pic is to paint it "properly" in Photoshop. And then, and only then, to crack open a bottle of wine and unleash a few choice effects on it for the sheer entertainment of seeing what happens.

'Got stuck straight in with a palette of Flesh tones for Little Red, painted heartily on a single layer. Decided I'd maybe compromised the purity of the original drawing and set the opacity down to about %50 for the time being... which is sort of cheating but hey.

As ever, I'm going to have to watch my monster, that wolf. He should absolutely be a bit primal and terrifying, but this has to appeal to publishers too...

Little Red Riding Hood

You have to have a go at the classics eventually, eh?

Little Red Riding Hood is a horrifying, absurd, hilarious tale. Every child who encounters this scene for the first time must be silently screaming "Yes, yes, yes, it's wearing your grandmother's bonnet and spectacles, but seriously, you know, the teeth, and the fur, and the smell. You deserve everything you get you ridiculous girl... what's that, mum? Crapping myself? Me? No, I'm fine mum, really..."

It's no wonder Red's so often drawn as a bit of a cipher - blank faced and dumb. Still, I've attempted to depict her as a fairly clued-up human being whose brain happens to have been briefly in thrall to the insane fairy tale going on around her, happy to be strung out on it's hazy heightened dream logic, because that's the way this curious world works, that's the way the story goes. This is the "Oh shit" moment where the closest thing she presently has to reality - a lupine nightmare dressed as her grannie - is about to swallow her up.

I'll be back with an update once it's coloured. Oh, and don't forget to click on the drawing if you want to see it up close and proper.