Progress. I masked some areas so I could splatter paint on the underbrush and trees. More splattering will be necessary, including more detail work to the trees on the right, but the work moves forward in the picture plane, and I am starting to add washes to the foreground. I had to take yesterday off to shovel snow with my neighbors (we got two feet) as well as do an ink drawing for a story by Graham Masterton scheduled for CD #65.

I went with French Ultramarine Blue, which, in the case of Windsor & Newton Professional Series, is actually made from ground up semi-precious Lapis Lazuli. At this stage I am only blocking in color. The trick is to maintain the values and intensities as I build up the layers of transparent color to give solidity and dimensionality to the subject matter. One of the good things about Arches paper is that it can take repeated washes of new color over old without ruining the layers below. As I progress, I will increasingly use a drybrush technique - paint on a brush that has had most of the water squeezed out of it - weaving the textures of the grass, leaves, trees, old metal glider, porch rails, etc. This is where it starts to get really fun.

I finished a slow, detailed re-read of the final galley and identified at least three interior illustration images and an endpaper image to do. One was suggested by Brian. Another involves his dog Steve, and Brian provided me with some photos, so we'll have at least one good Steve portrait in this one. That "Chugga Chugga" train may be a problem, though. I went to a local Toys "R" Us and could not find the thing. I may have to go with something else for illustration #4.

I began the painting the way I begin all my paintings, from the back to the front. I also began with relatively light washes, applied in broken patterns to keep random patches of white paper showing through. Keeping the light source always in mind, I left some edges of tree trunks white as well. Once you plop paint somewhere, the white of the paper is lost, and the paper is the only source of white in a watercolor painting. So keeping the white of the paper in play as long as necessary is an important technique to master.

I use a porcelain butcher tray for a palette. So far I am using Cadmium Yellow Light, Yellow Ochre, Raw Umber, Burnt Umber, Payne's Grey, and Permanent Green Light. This will probably be all of the colors I will use for this painting with the addition of a blue, probably Cobalt or French Ultramarine. I might also add some Indian Red to help with the rust in the glider. What I WON'T add is a black. To me, black pigment kills in watercolor. I prefer creating more luminous darks from mixing the Payne's Grey with Burnt Umber and a touch of something complimentary (a green or a red) depending on whether I want a warm dark or a cool one. Limiting the palette is one way to insure overall hue harmony and achieve a more natural look. The story calls for a bright green floral pattern on the glider cushions, but I already have the Permanent Green Light on board, so I will be fine there. This brings up a minor, but important point in illustrating: READ the story, and take accurate description notes. When you take liberties with the author's words, there had better be a good reason for it. In this case, the description of the glider was nothing more specific than it is "old" and that it is on a deck. I brought this deck around to the front of the house because I wanted to include the driveway and the out building where the protagonist does his writing. I broke the driveway at the halfway point to add a visual distance and interest to it. This wasn't described in the story, but I felt it needed it to reinforce how high and how long it is, both important aspects to the story. 

All of my "stuff" is on the left side because I am left-handed, and it is never smart to bring a loaded brush over a watercolor painting any farther than is absolutely necessary. Since I work flat (in this case, on my coffee table in my living room) this is something I keep in mind. Watercolor is not very forgiving; once the paint plops, it stays plopped.

I decided to do the cover of Brian Keene's upcoming novella "The Girl On The Glider" in watercolor for a number of reasons. First, watercolor is what I do best. It is also the painting media I have used the longest. If you go to the "Early Works" page, you can see some of the watercolor work (and the obvious Wyeth influence) I did in college. Current watercolor work can best be seen in my Roofscape series. Second, the story is set in southeast-central Pennsylvania, an area of the country I am very familiar with because I live there too, but also the area of the country where America's premier watercolorist - Andrew Wyeth - lived and worked (in the winter months of his life, anyway; summers were spent in and around Cushing, Maine). Wyeth was the single most important influence on my work, and he passed away at age 91 last year. I wanted this painting to be an homage of sorts. Third, watercolors go fast, so I should be able to finish and deliver this to CD Publications in short order.

As you can see in the preliminary drawing above (done in pencil on a large pad of tracing paper) the subject matter is an old porch glider, an outbuilding on the left, and a rising driveway that ends high at the road. Readers of the story will know exactly why this scene was chosen. The composition also leaves lots of room for the title display and the author byline typematter without obscuring the "view". If you look closely you can see a dot in the driveway above the glider. That is the vanishing point of the one-point perspective I used to get the lines of the glider and the outbuilding correct. If you look at the ring designs in the porch post, you can see that the middle ones are level with your viewpoint, the upper ones are angled down just a bit, and the lower ones ... well, the lower ones in the drawing are angled too much to "vanish" correctly at the horizon line that the vanishing point defines. When I transferred the drawing to my watercolor block, I corrected this.

I am using my old faithfuls: an Arches hot pressed, 140 pound watercolor paper (hot pressed means the paper was sent through hot metal rollers before drying, leaving a smooth surface; 140 pound weight is a medium thickness, since the range choice is from 90 pound to 400); Windsor & Newton watercolor paints, and Windsor & Newton sable brushes. Arches is simply the best commercially available watercolor paper made. Same with Windsor & Newton for the brushes and paint. Fine old (1492 for Arches!) firms, as they say. As my Dad always told me: use good tools, and half the work's done.

When completed, this will be a "pretty" painting I will be proud to frame and hang on my living room wall. Hopefully, from the reader's perspective, it will also be "creepy". The final painting will be too large to scan, so I will be shipping it down to my son-in-law, a professional digital photographer, who will create the final TIF and JPEG files. You can see on his blog his technique for photographing art, in this case, a large painting my brother gave he and my daughter for a wedding present, HERE.

I completed a "how-to" film for the making of the cover of James Newman's "The Wicked" (Necessary Evil Press, 2007), which you can see by selecting the "How To" link at left. With things I learned in iMovie creating the Wicked film - better clip lengths, transitions, and a soundtrack, for example - I decided to revisit the "Frankenstein" film and tweak it a bit.