The second watercolour wash for Diane Cantrell’s “Good-bye, Baby Max” was pretty satisfying as you can see right away how the lighting will be treated for each illustration. I’m trying a new technique to give it a golden, nostalgic feel …I’m going to try working with limited colours to start and then once everything is looking good, I’ll add tints of other colours (purples, blues, greens) afterwards with a wash of watercolour. Hey, feel free to post any comments or questions along the way if you’re interested in the process or have comments on the illustrations…I won’t bite!

(Read on …)

Illustrations © Heather Castles
Purple Ribbons © Cristina Guarneri
The last leg of the journey is often the longest…I spent about 16 hours working on the details of these illustrations after the initial watercolour washes were down. I’m really happy with how the illustrations turned out and am glad I challenged myself to modify my style to emphasize the lighting. Here’s a sneak peak at Cristina Guarneri’s “Purple Ribbons,” I’ll post again when the final book is published! (Read on …)

I am working on Diane Cantrell’s children’s book “Good-bye, Baby Max”, and she has kindly let me post the progress of her story as I’m illustrating it! This is a warm story about a kindergarten class who learn to deal with grief in different ways, when one of their baby chicks doesn’t hatch. Written in prose, this story was a challenge to illustrate just because it is dealing with an entire class with several characters. Materials to be used : watercolour & coloured pencil on cold-press illustration board.

Technique : Because I couldn’t use a light table to transfer the sketch to the final paper from behind (the illustration board is too thick), I purchased an artograph Tracer and found that very helpful to transfer & scale up to the correct size from my small sketches. I’m laying down the warmest colours first, as working with skin tones can be tricky to keep warm & clean and I find this has been the easiest way to do both. The colours will be much warmer & friendly on the pages where the kids are happy, and cool colours to give things a more serious tone on the pages where the kids are dealing with grief. Lighting will be in most cases from behind or from a bright side source to give some interesting shadows. The next step will be to go over with one more wash before using pencil, as these will be very tonal illustrations and I want to make sure all the bodies & structure are just right by shading with pencil first and layering the watercolour on after.

These are the final sketches for “Good-bye, Baby Max”, written by Diane Cantrell, for you to have a peak at as reference when seeing my splotchy first coats of paint on the finals! The swatches in the corner are colours I am thinking of use to paint that particular spread. I am working on the text layout for this book as well, thus the type application on these sketches… I found working with the type & illustrations at once to be very helpful in creating more dynamic illustrations. I’m quite excited about starting the illustrations for this project.

(Read on …)

Illustration by Heather Castles (MacKay) © Image Craft, Inc. (now Hallmark)

Frost Fairy Christmas greeting card illustration & design
End Client: Image Craft Inc.
End Product : Greeting Card
Media Used To Create: Colored Pencil, Pastel, Pencil, Watercolor
Copyright Owner: Hallmark

Description of the process :
Another one-day-turnaround illustration for Image Craft, Inc. I had the idea, drew a doodle, showed it to my colleague sitting next to me…then cracked out the paint & pencils and illustrated it that morning. By the afternoon it was scanned, I dropped the text on and designed where the sparkle foil application would go… and it was approved the next morning during our group a.m. critique! I do miss working at Image Craft, it was pretty exciting in the sense that they had so many cards to produce yearly that almost anything I came up with ended up being published… it’s not often that you’re given so much freedom as a designer/illustrator. I was really pleased with the final product (the jpg doesn’t do the foil justice!) (Read on …)

(Note : one of my good clients a little paranoid after she read this post…just to put your mind at ease, I enjoy laughing with my clients, not at them! These are just especially funny things that have been said to other designers…that we can enjoy a little giggle at!)
Ah, these made me laugh… as creatives we use jargon every day and sometimes forget that our clients don’t quite know what the heck we’re talking about! AdVerbatims has blogged some hilarious examples of this, here are a few that tickled me :

#308- “Can we remove the french things on the word ‘resume’?”
(Client, Marketing Manager to Designer)

#311- “This all looks nice, but I’m not sure about the color or the way it’s all put on the page. Here are some fabric swatches and some photos of the artwork we just redid our living room with… this is really more what I think we’re going for here. But what you did was nice too!”
(Client feedback)

#276- “Can you make the hamster look less ambitious?”
(Client to Agency)

#302- “Could you possibly give us a design for the business card that’s more like the one our CEO designed in PowerPoint?”
(Client, Marketing Director to Designer)

#301- “There’s a lot of empty space in this ad, but I’m just not sure that the audience we are targeting is the empty-space audience.”
(Agency, Account manager to Designer)

#292- “Well, I love the general feel but I rather expected to have photos instead of these scribbles.”
(Client, on showing hand-visualised mock-up of brochure)

#280- “Could you please make the thought bubbles in this ad more realistic?”
(Client to Designer)

#322- “I just need this to get into Communications Arts.”
(Creative Director to designers, weekly)

(and, my personal favourite, the one that almost made me cry…)

#298- “But they’re in Canada… Can they even read an eps file?”
(Agency Owner to Art Director)