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ladies and gentlereaders this is the very week that maleficent comes out in theaters and i reckon there has never been a better time to sit back and type out the big ol process post that has been a brewin for the last few weeks since the book s come out for those of you who are completely lost i recently illustrated the curse of maleficent a ya chapter book tie in for the upcoming maleficent movie it s on shelves now and can be procured on amazon if you re so inclined so far the feedback has been extremely positive and i am blessed and honored to feel so supported by you guys best corner of the internet ever so all that said it seems as good a time as any to talk candidly about the process of putting a project like this together this is likely to wax a little more technical than my usual sentimental philosophical so if you came for the arts welcome for the feels see my last entry other warnings i will be pretty chatty hopefully that is of interest to some of you and if not there are plenty of pretty pictures to scroll to also spoilers if you want to see the movie book without foreknowledge of the events to come don t read this yet okay okay a little background might be helpful no i connected with disney publishing many moons ago at my first ever comic con in new york city chime noises flashback begins i was just a youngling shopping my student portfolio around from table to table and i noticed a fellow standing alone by the disney booth i wandered up and asked is he was looking at portfolios he wasn t really but you know why not hand it over he would eventually become my friend and editor but it started with a happenstance encounter and a little bravery perhaps more than a little naivete my takeaway always try you never know when someone is going to take an interest in your art and you ll find yourself moving in a lot of surprising directions if you keep trying asking seeking you miss every shot you don t take we stayed in touch and a couple of years later the right mix of my availability and their need came together book time more or less actually the first thing i was asked to do was a few test illustrations based on some early movie stills to see what my style interpretation would look like for the project so we ll start there i ve gotten a lot of questions about my process over the years and while i ve done a livestream or two showing how my work comes together on the page the actual drawing part is only a piece of the puzzle illustration of any kind starts with the idea and the idea starts properly in the thumbnails my favorite professor often quoted a mentor of his the final work is the excrement of your thumbnails words to live by as far as i m concerned it s been my experience that almost all the hardest most important work is done in the thumbnails and the color study everything after that is icing the composition storytelling and basic design are all in the sketches thumbs and again just my approach they are best when detail is left entirely to the side i actually blunt my pencils on purpose and draw only half an inch high to start it helps me to forget all the unnecessary detail and focus on the whole what is the bigger composition communicating how can i tell the story just through light dark shape and pose the first thing i tried to pitch was a bold graphic collage style piece where aurora wandering through the forest would be framed in the folds of maleficent s cloak not a bad idea but they were looking for more literal scenes we took this direction up to color study and then switched tacks of course the next phase started with more thumbnails you can see also some of my first sketches trying to nail down maleficent s look some of them are a bit embarrassing to me now it takes some searching sometimes to get where you want to go for this project in both representation of the character and the scenes i was trying to find some way to marry the feeling of an animated feature with the look of the live action movie i didn t want to literally draw angelina herself but try to get at the look feel of her version of the character in a stylized way that still recalled the classic animated villain we went back and forth on a few iterations but eventually found a version everyone including the lady herself was happy with o_o we honed in on 3 pieces we wanted to try in order to get the portray the range of the character for the test the strong more innocent side that was new for this film the villainous and the tragic the first tester and still one of my favorites from the whole project is a rare portrayal of maleficent framed against the rolling fields of the world beyond her home something about this look moment really spoke to me i really wanted to capture the breathless sense of hopefulness and adventure as well as the strength that angelina brings to the character this first piece was also the first experiment in style i really wanted to bring some of my watercolor experiments to bear but couldn t find a way to efficiently marry actual paint and my digital process for the book so i started to use my first ever customized brushes in photoshop i know it s taken me a while to try and reproduce the gesture and spontaneity of watercolor and sketch lineart on the characters with lineless painted backgrounds was something i wanted to try in order to recall the look and feel of an animated film it s definitely a style i want to explore more and take further in future work lots of fun to do i discovered that backgrounds are less intimidating and frustrating when i get to paint them win win it also has the virtues of being faster and leaving some of the world open to the imagination of the reader win win win w working in line on scenery and architecture has always felt very confining and stressful to me but wandering around in the summer with my watercolors taught me that i don t hate landscapes at all i actually love them but i was approaching it the wrong way to unlock that painting more loosely feels like i ve unshackled myself and i can just run at it waaay more fun for me but striking the right balance between line and paint was a hard fight initially sometimes it clicks better than others this one i haven t posted before because i just don t feel it worked out as well the work is all tighter but it lacks some of that gestural dreamy quality that the first illustration had everything s a little too clean and for whatever reason the moment doesn t quite connect it s not quite the right expression and pose for the character there are a lot of things i would do differently but it was full of good lessons correcting my course slightly i started in on the 3rd test piece which wound up being a great favorite with the folks at the mouse house since it married the look of the first tester with a fully realized maleficent in a more iconic stand there and feel feelings kind of mood i tried to bring my own interpretation to how i wanted to draw the forest taking inspiration from mary blair and eyvind earle s amazing inimitable work on the original animated film i think this one sold the team on the look shortly thereafter we were off to make a book such a great day the first round of thumbnails and my commentary for my editor warning spoilers abound which began with you guessed it thumbnails hooray i spent a good chunk of time working out thumbnails i happily recall the angst oh golden hindsight sitting in coffee shops with a nub of a pencil pacing around trying to figure out how to squeeze everything in figuring out thumbnails is like fitting too many dishes in the dishwasher they never quite fit and it s always kind of a panic until it suddenly all does and you wonder why you were ever worried in the first place this is especially true of comics but was also super true in this case as well by this point i had been given very guarded access to the film s script and received a whole bunch of preliminary screen shots and concept art to base my work on at the time of writing this i still haven t seen the final film so i ll be just as surprised as anyone to see how it all turned out it was also at this point that i started to do my own research for the project knowing the general direction i wanted to take it i still had never done a book like this before my good friends adam and courtney let me raid their prodigious children s book collection for inspiration and i went out and bought myself a book of n c wyeth s illustrations because guys that dude knows what s up when it comes to high adventure and storytelling through strong composition accept no substitutes looking at wyeth s work reassured me that there was merit in letting extraneous details fall away and focusing on the emotion color and composition in broader terms not familiar stop reading this and go get ye some wyeth shortly after locking in the main thumbnails which was after some back and forth with the editors always way better to do that early on rather than later down the line when the pieces are all painted and shiny i did something i m very glad i did i threw together a color script just a collection of color studies for the whole book s worth of illustrations so i and importantly my editors could see the whole thing layed out at once this gave me a strong base to work from no matter how large the project was i knew where i was going and what i still had to do before we were quite off to the races the studio wanted to see some final ish iterations of the two main characters maleficent and aurora in my style based on the film designs before they could sign off looking back at these drawings now they re a little funny i almost didn t want to post them because they re far from my favorite drawings of the characters but figuring out these two was part of the process and i think i got better at it as i went along gotta start somewhere luckily this was close enough to move forward with though i m glad i got more confident in drawing them as i went on a note here i think about drawing female characters it s not traditionally been a strong suit for me at least growing up as a young human male i grew up drawing other human males of the grimdark superhero variety and only much later down the line became comfortable with drawing 1 women 2 children 3 smiles you see those hard journey it may be hard for some of you to believe but the house at happy rock was once located on dudebro grimdark island where there were no cooties allowed ugh if dudebro hangups are hard for you to get your head around you can t even imagine i had a hard time using the color pink because that was a lady color it was a few years of art school and some soul searching to realize you know what i love pink disney and musicals i want to know how to draw things that are cute characters that smile and people who are female it was actually hard for me to reconcile that with some serious straight white dudebro baggage but i m so glad i did it s been years since emerging from the grimdark but i feel a profound sense of victory being asked to illustrate a book whose principle character is one of the coolest disney women of all time in a wicked the musical esque story of adventure and angst it s a hard fought dream come true and here s the other thing sorry this is a long aside coming out of the world of dudebro comics and recently out of the video games industry i was so excited about the opportunity to tell a story in which women are actual characters not just objects or set dressing where they have complex emotions and motivations are both good and flawed and are treated with the dignity we afford most male characters all the time that is a solution i want to be part of i don t even want to give blogspace to describing the problem i was raised by and around women with incredible strength of character and many of the artists i look up to are talented driven women i see no reason not to celebrate that whole half of the human population and have been embarrassed and dismayed by the portrait recent events have painted of men and our outlook anyways the way that has to do with art and specifically this book i just wanted to design and portray the characters as people in the best way i know how not saying i m perfect at it my biggest hope was not anything more than to depict the women of maleficent as people experiencing a range of emotions and living fully through their stories it s a shame that s even remotely rare alright i think i ve made my point where were we ah yes thumbs by this point between color study and thumbnail with sketches source material and research to hand all the hardest work was been done all the biggest thinking and decisions were made and all there was to do was draw and paint i find that if i can set myself up to get to that place i am much happier and less panicked and more efficient than when i am throwing sketches and thumbnails down on the fly i holed up for a few months and worked steadily through the book s worth of illustrations with varying degrees of success and satisfaction the illustration at the top of this entry is i think my favorite of the whole set but since i ve been given permission i figured i d show you guys a few more d in no particular order some of my favorites from the project the rightmost illustration was originally intended to be the cover of the book which is why you won t find it in among the pages i m still pleased with it but i m glad we decided on another direction while it may not see print at least it can have a life here on the internet an in progress shot of the piece that would eventually become the cover it wasn t designed as such but it turned out well enough that my editors decided it would make a better cover than the cover we had drawn up i think they made the right call the final image had to be extended several inches to fit the cover dimensions of course it would be the crowd scene p it turned out for the best though next time i do a project like this i ll pay more attention to when the focal point lands dead in the gutter rookie mistake the print of this in the book makes it look like maleficent is suspiciously eyeing a mysterious horse that has shown up in her wooded glen _ on the left still one of my favorite drawings of maleficent from the whole thing once i had this version of her down i tried to apply this attitude and feel to the rest of the project this is another favorite that never made it to the final book for story and film related reasons alas the spinning wheel itself one of the classic moments it occasionally felt surreal to be illustrating since this is my already a pretty indulgent blog post i may as well go all the way above is a little collage i made for myself once the whole thing was wrapped up a collection of my favorite bits color and drawing moments from the whole set everybody has their down days when you look back on your work and you can t find anything to like i photoshoppped this together to remind myself of wh...