Information Robot

I opened my studio doors back in 1988. It was a tiny office space on the 9th floor of  a very tall highrise. Being a cartoonist mixed in within a world of accountants and lawyers was the ONLY thing I had going for me since ”word of  mouth” P.R.  was the only way I could initially achieve any drawing assignments. You see I had  just missed the Yellow Pages phone directory add cut off and this forced me to wait another 6 months before I had the opportunity to  go public with my business phone number.   Gee, how things have changed.  You can literally get your information out to the public in minutes… not months!!!

Artistically speaking,  I find this new technology really neat.  You can create something and within minutes, all your friends, family and even business connections can view your ware.    (Sometimes even if they don’t want to. )   So even though this  information super highway thing sometimes seems like a machine ….or you feel like a robot….  I like it.  Because waiting for a slow internet connection or delayed text is a lot better than waiting 6 months for your phone number to become public.

Halloween Art

Creating art on illustration board or on the computer screen is normally all I do as an artist.  All I REALLY want to do.  Yet in the last few years I’ve  found that there is other forms of creativity for me that is just as rewarding. And  I “think” it’s making me a better artist.

I’ve never been one to take pottery, photography, print making or countless other lessons  that teach you how to express yourself creatively.  Artistic outlets that help you understand form, light or design.  But I do like to decorate for the holidays.  Christmas is a big one for me and I enjoy Halloween too.  What’s odd is I’m not a horror movie fan and I don’t like gore!  But what started off as a few pumpkins on my walkway quickly turned into an elaborate yard scene filled with vampires and zombies.   Now that yard scene has  become a full-blown spooky haunted tour.  For the second year in a row, my neighbor and I joined forces with our friends and family and put on a pretty good show for the community.  We had over 21 actors, 7 separate scenes and I belive we had over 250 trick or treators come through my yard.

Creatively I really enjoy the art of making the props, costumes and setting up various scenes with some acting involved.   This seems like it would have little to do with being an illustrator but as I tell my students, draw what you see around you.  When I look at a blank piece of paper I see mentally how the final piece should be in a few hours.  I think it’s the same way with the Halloween show.  Except the blank piece of paper  is actually my lawn and I saw what it should look like way back in September. 

Although this paricular post has little to do with art from my sketch book, I’m simply showing  how I get my inspiration.  Case in point– the two images below.  That’s me  in my home-made scarecrow outfit and stand I made perched 4 feet off the ground.  Inspired by The Wizard of Oz scene I saw as a child.  And theres my witch punting a football 4 yard down field.  Inspired by a memory of my son and I having fun kicking the ball back and forth a few weeks ago.  The two may seem totally unrelated  but they actually are.  I’m always inspired by what I see!  I just never know when it’ll come out.

Have a Nasty Christmas

I remember many years back doing a design for a card company named Comstock Greetings.  They wanted the  jokes and art  to be VERY smutty or as nasty as possible.  Their P.R. actually had the F bomb in it and said we sell cards that shock people!!!   WOW!  I honestly don’t recall what joke and art I did for them but it must have been a gag about boogers.   :)  After many year of staying away from selling to that kind of card  lines (since I’ve never been that good at writing dirty jokes) I  recently approached another card company similar to Comstock determined that this time, things would be different.    The publisher asked for some low brow ”ideas” so I put my poor taste joke nose to the drawing board and  came up with 16 of my best “worst” ideas ever.   Certainly they’d see that I could tell a nasty joke with the best of em!   Just got the call.   None were nasty, dirty or shocking enough for them.  I need to up the humor  a lot more!

                                                                         End result was NO SALE!        Bummer.  

In truth though…. yah gotta sell what you’re good at.  Guess I’m more cutesy then smutty.  I do like that joke below about the snowflake slipping  on the bottom of someone’s shoe though.   )

Waiting for something good

 I’m still TRULY amazed that I take a blank piece of paper and create a living from it.  It doesn’t seem possible! Yet it has been.  And for a while — I couldn’t keep up with the work load.

About 12 years or so ago I landed a greeting card account that kept me busy.  Then just when I thought I couldn’t keep up with the various card companies I did some assignments for , not excluding the caricatures and the children’s book efforts, this ONE company gave me triple the amount of work.  At that point I stopped advertising and didn’t really push my other customers to keep me busy since it was all I could do to keep this one customer happy.  Then a few years later, as all good things do—- the card company was bought by one of the giants in the industry and that was that.  Bye Bye Scott!   I think back to those  times and say to myself “was I wrong to put all my freelance eggs in one basket”?   The answer that  inevitably comes back to me is always.. “no.”  When one customer is keeping you as busy as the sum of 10… you can better service that customer. 

Since then I’ve been trying to play catch up in the card market world but I’m doubtful that it’ll ever be the same for me again.  E cards, the 99 cent racks and the 2 for 1 have  slowed down the whole greeting card market in general. Especially the humorous stuff that I do.   Ironically the card  industry has seen this slow economic time coming for a while now.   Oddly though, I think my own card drawing ability has actually gotten better since my “heyday” time.

So is it over?   Well hopefully the greeting card market recovers a bit and as I sit here waiting by my mailbox having just sent out a large self promotion package, I can’t help but not be excited for what’s to come.  Something good I hope.     Something REALLY good!!!! 

How a sketch is born

99% of all my work starts off with a  real basic sketch.  You can see the entire process on how I create a greeting card concept if you visit my YouTube channel here…  WWW.ScottNelsonandSon.com  /watch Scott Draw.

In previous posts I’ve talked about a  children’s book series I was working on that revolved around embarrasssing bodily functions.  Ewww !  (chuckle)   An artist rep I’ve been working with was kind enough to show my ideas to a few  different publishers. It’s my understanding that a number of them liked what they saw but they couldn’t fit it in with their current marketing niche.  In this tough economic climate, it’s tough to sell something unproven.  Especially when it’s about awkward suject matters.    Determined though to get this series published, I’m reworking the interior look into a more “comic book” like format. 

My normal process with children’ s books is to write first and then draw afterwards.  Then it’s a constant process of  editing the dialogue to fit the art or to edit the art to fit the dialogue.  It’s truly never ending and on occasion there may be two dozen versions of one little image all in an effort  to get the look just right. 

Now as I’m dealing with the agent, I’m not drawing or painting final art  just yet. I’m just trying to sell them on my ideas.  That said, I don’t want them to see my REAL sloppy sketches either. It’s a balancing act of not wasting to much time yet still showing something that is better than my sloppy initial sketches.  Attached you can see the process in which I’ve roughed out tiny interiors on post it notes while I was sitting in auto shop the other day.  Not sure if I’ll use any of em and I certainly wouldn’t show them.  But that’s how I do it.  I’m also showing you my original SLOPPY sketch  of a cover and then a more cleaned up version  of the same thing that I actually would show the agent.   Although I’m never totally satified with my finished art,  the process to getting there is actually very satisfying.    So— draw, draw draw.  Especially while you’re waiting for your car to get new shocks.  It’s great fun.

Isn’t it called “from the sketch book?”

Sometimes I forget that the title of this blog is called “From the sketch book.”   So for today, here is an actual SKETCH taken right from my sketch book.   While working on a children’s book concept, I was thinking about changing my main characters in the story from dogs to space kids.   Didn’t really work out but I actually like the look of this style.   Maybe another story will come up and I will be able to elaborate on this concept.

Pencil sketching outdoors.

Last year I brought some art supplies on vacation and did a bit of painting at the Maine cottage we go to. This year I got so busy packing the truck with my surfboard stuff that I forgot about packing my art stuff. Since the trip was only going to be an extended weekend, I figured it wasn’t a big deal and didn’t turn around to go get the materials back at the studio.  Once  on that beautiful Maine seacoast though, I couldn’t help but want to create something.  Luckily I had a drawing tablet  and a few pencils under my truck’s seat  .  On day two, (after surfing of course) I  made my way down to the sand looking for some inspiration.  I found it when I turned around to look back at the cottage.   A lobster trap that had washed up and was under the beach stairs.  I plunked myself down and went to work! Less then 45 minutes later I felt the lap of water at my feet and realized I was about to be over taken by the incoming tide.  So this quick pencil sketch is NOT accurate at all.  It hardly shows the lobster trap I intended on sketching and it doesn’t  show ten or so relatives at the top of that rock wall pointing, laughing and hoping I am  taken out by a HUGE wave.   LOL ! Vacations are soooo awesome!

Book Store

I stopped by my local Barnes and Noble book store the other night just to poke around. Ending up buying two music CDs, (both bands from the 80s— whooo hooo) but they didn’t have the Art Marketing book I was looking for.  Since I was there, I figured I might as well drift over to the children’s book section just to see if they still had two of my titles in stock. (Yes, you got me. — This was the real reason I went in there.)  And  there they were! YEAH!   Both books, still in stock. But then I realized… there they STILL were.  I hadn’t checked in some time but unless they had restocked, nobody had bought a copy in the last 6 months.    Regardless, it’s still a great feeling to pull your creations of the shelf from a national chain.   It helped motivate me to want even  more on that shelf  in the future.  Even in this bad economy I still strive to be the best artist I can be and if that means you need to block an isle every 6 months so you can take pictures of your books – all the while preventing someone from buying yet  another copy of Harry Potter….well so be it.  

Caricature T-shirt part 2

A few posts back I wrote about some caricature work I had done for a T shirt  company that was printing sports figure shirts for the NHL.   Although the demand for this style of  shirts has faded a bit over the years (sorry, bad pun),  I’d LOVE to do more sports shirts like this.     Found some final art I had done for this company in 1990 as they prepped to print even more shirts for the likes of the NBA.  Sadly it never was printed and I was never paid when the company went under.  Regardless, I like  this  green and black pencil image  done on Cokeel board (sorry, no idea how to spell Cokeel__ Sounds like Koo- keal).  This image  printed as one color would be  the base for the silk screen. I believe 7 other colors would have been added.  The Cokeel allows facial tones, muscle tones and shadows  to come through better then simple  line art.    I can’t find cokeel board anymore and miss working with it.  If anyone has seen it recenly (or spell it) , please let me know. 

Family Portrait

I customer recently hired me to draw his family and his home. Although I feel most comfortable painting in water color, markers or charcoal, he specifically asked for a colored pencil rendering.  As I mentioned in a previous post,  this medium isn’t a  problem for me on a smaller scale. But this 18×24 took me well over a week to illustrate.  Colors have to build slowly,  layer after layer to get a rich look. And all the time you are only using is a little pencil point to cover a large surface area. This is not to say I didn’t Love doing the art.  Simply,  I’m glad it’s finally done for him and I’m hopeful the family likes it.   That said… maybe I should invent colored pencils the size of a shapie!