... here is another. No spoilers. Read the book, it will all make sense. I could draw Elmo every day of the week, btw.

A few more tweaks for detail, but this one is about done.

Tackling the porch and the glider, and whatever bits of driveway and underbrush show through. As I darken the foreground and add texture and "age", this will hopefully come into focus. Maintaining the overall tonal values is key to making it all look "real". This will be done sometime this long weekend. I already have a FEDEX box ready to send it off to Virginia to be photographed. This weekend I will work on the interior illustrations, beginning with the endpapers. The signature sheet illustration, with the all-important Elmo, was done a few weeks ago and delivered to the publisher so they could get that project going. I am really looking forward to drawing a portrait of Brian's dog Steve, a meta-illustration for a meta-novel.

There is another  two feet of snow falling, and a Snow Emergency in my town and all of the surrounding towns, which means I get to play hooky legally and have a weekday to get more work done on this cover painting. I am wrestling in the underbrush, trying to tone it down to mainly a raw umber color, with shadows I will also be adding texture to the gravel driveway surface in the foreground. The splattering of paint I did earlier will serve for this texture in the distance. The trees seem too dark, so I might do some scraping with a single-edge razor blade. The painting overall seems too "tight", and I will need to loosen it up with more free, broad brushwork.  

I decided that the paint scheme of the glider will be a colonial blue with white trim. Plus rust. The deck will be painted grey, and the house trim will remain white. I anticipate Gail Cross, or whoever does the typographical design for the title and byline, will use a rich orange. Gold embossing would be good too, but that is pricey due to the fact that an embossing die set would have to be created.

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.