This painting is for 2021 Boynton Walk Award winner Hunchbacks by David P. Drummond. I adore birches and aspens and alders and all those pale, ghostly trees. We had a stand (of three) paper birch in our driveway island when I was growing up and even though they became giant cotton candy balls every spring (from the amount of caterpillars in them), I still loved those trees. The darn caterpillars did eventually kill them off. We have them elsewhere on the property though.

Oh right! I am on the property now! Hence the weeks of silence. It was a ridiculously hard move. I guess we were moving people out and in at the same time to make it more complicated. My office is still a staging area, so Abe and I are still sharing an office. Oh well.

Anyways, let’s start with those digital pencils.

Pretty easy one. As ever, you can see that I pushed them together for the original illustration up top and then I digitally pushed them apart and filled the background for the printing.

Thank goodness for content-aware fill in Photoshop. They have even made it better. Shocking and wonderful. The original is just pencil and watercolor. 

Turned out pretty nice with the poem! It is one of the more subtle illustrations I did, but I’ll admit it is not a high-paying job so I have to make it fast and interesting.

More to come. I have a few more of these to show you and while I do that, I hope to organize my office so I can show you that. I also hope to actually organize all my original art and see what I haven’t posted before. Might be some exciting things in there. I didn’t really start posting online with a purpose until CCS so I might repost some things from 10+ years ago.