| OREO OPENER... | |
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The O is a difficult letter for me
to illustrate (that hole in the middle!), so I'm always subconsciously
looking for an idea (unfortunately, the O isn't the only letter that's
hard for me). I don't know how this particular idea came to me, but
it solves several problems. First of all, the idea of pulling the
Oreo apart is very familiar (lots of people will know immediately
what's going on--for the rest, there's the caption), it has an owl
and an Oreo (Os are also a problem to name, and here I've hit
the jackpot with those O words already in the illustration)...plus
the "hole". This is a typical thumbnail of mine: Simple scratches scribbled solely so I'm not stymied. Click on any illustration for an enlargement. |
| Sketchbook drawing using full-sized letter outline. I wasn't sure what to do with the curved bottom of the O (another major problem area for me with all Os), My solution was to have the owl sitting with feet facing us. Once I got out some reference material, I saw how big an owl's feet really are, not like those puny pigeon feet I've got in the sketch. |
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The final drawing, basically the same as the sketch, except I looked much more closely at the features of real owls (especially the bottoms of the feet), exaggerating things somewhat...okay, maybe more than just somewhat. |
| Here
the application of water-based
dyes serves as the underpainting for the colored pencils. This step
became more finished than almost all (if not all) the other letters
at this stage. There's none of the usual turquoise/teal background
seen in nearly all the others (at the time of this writing, it's the only one). I had just a peek of the background color showing
through (at the top of the O in the drawing step), but I thought eliminating
it brought the owl's head slightly forward, which I liked. |
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| The colored pencil stage where most of the work is done. There's a lot of color and design change going on in the owl's feathers, and when I tried to get it all just right, it got very difficult to distinguish features, thus making it very difficult to tell what was going on. In the end, I just faked it; after all, it's the story that's important, right? | |
| I added some acrylics to better define the owl, but hardly touched the cookie. This is one of those ('way too few) letters that takes no time at all to do, start to finish. I need more of these. |  |
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