Still chugging along on the final illustrations with lots of eye-straining late nights & working-weekends. Here’s a little piece of one of the spreads I’m working on right now.

My boyfriend and I took off on a spontaneous road trip to Portland, OR for a couple of days to celebrate his birthday and while down there we went to see the exhibit The Artist’s Touch, The Craftsman’s Hand: Three Centuries of Japanese Prints from the Portland Art Museum. I have a particular fondness for Japanese woodcut prints, born out of the many hours spent as a kid poring over my grandmother’s collection of books on the subject, so I was thrilled that we managed to squeeze in a visit – it provided a perfect little artistic recharge and the trip gave my eyes a much needed break. 

If you are anywhere near Portland, I highly recommend taking the opportunity to see the exhibit. It’s one thing to see reproductions of the prints in books, and a completely different experience to see them up close. I spent quite a bit of time with my nose about 5″ off the glass. Reproductions, as good as many of them are now, just don’t give a complete sense of the translucency or subtle texture of the paper.

I took a lot of iphone photos of details I found particularly wonderful and wanted to remember for future reference, and also bought the catalogue so I can turn to it when I need a bit of an artistic pick-me-up.

(l-r top)   Katsukawa Shunkō | Ichikawa Danjūrō V as a yamabushi, 1779-81; Keisai Eisen | The Courtesan Uryūno, c. 1830

(centre) Katsukawa SHUN’EI (1762-1819), Hachidanme (Act VII: The bride’s journey) From the series Chūshingura (The Treasurey of Loyal Retainers), early 1790′s

(l-r bottom) Totoya Hokkei | Usokai (Bullfinch Exchange), probably 1831; Ogata Gekkō, Oishi Kuranosuke Yoshio, 1897

The exhibit runs until January 22, 2012.

I’ve inherited my boyfriend’s old iphone 3G after he upgraded to the shiny, fast, new model. It takes crummy photos and it’s really slow and it has always hated me – sometimes it just refuses to acknowledge my touch commands. But I still really like the (somewhat) immediacy of the photo function, and that I don’t have to fuss with big 7D files for silly little work-in-progress snaps. Now I can take really bad photos and add heavy-handed instagram filters to them, further satisfying my love for ambiguous images.
Bonus, I’m also not so worried about getting inky fingers on the thing.

The illustrations for this book are equal parts traditional and equal parts digital assembly. I’m in the thick of the digital stuff but stop every so often when I need to create more traditional elements. That requires cleaning my desk, just to make it really messy again.

It’s freeing just messing around with ink and a roll of rice paper. After trying to plan and figure out details so much on this project, it’s nice to find opportunities to work without a plan, just let interesting things happen, and let the medium lead the way.

There are minor frustrations here and there – like running out a rice paper and finding the new package I bought from Opus isn’t the same stuff as I bought before, and I like the texture much less.

Raven, Orca & Salmon (detail)

Page detail – catching starfish:

A detail from one of the first page spreads:

Here are a few more details of one of the illustrations I’ve been working on.

I’m going to keep these annoyingly small and vague, but here are a few pieces of some of the book from the last few months. There are isolation layers, multi-spread colour and shape planning, details of the early life of a few pieces and colour and texture tests. Some stuff is carefully planned, other bits are wonderfully happy accidents.

Here are a couple colouring work in progress images. With 4G file sizes, saving takes more than a few minutes.

(more of the swan under-drawing here, in a previous post)

Here’s a little tiny sneak peek of one an entire page spread – work in progress

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here on the book progress. All the hand work is more or less done, save for some fun messy paint texture stuff that I’ll need along the way. It’s all computer work from now on. Lots of scanning, lots of colouring, lots of isolating individual elements (now I’m paying for the sheer amount of detail I’ve crammed into each illustration).

At this point I’m trying to nail down cohesive colour and treatment. There have been some excruciatingly frustrating days where nothing has gone right. Moments of sheer panic and angst. But I think–hope–it’s in hand now.

Summer has finally arrived here in Vancouver (August – it’s about time!), and I’m again spending it on the wrong side of a window. The truth is, at the end of each work day the last thing I can face is spending any more time on the computer, even to produce a quick blog post. So updates will probably continue to be sporadic from now on.

Above are a few details of work from the last few weeks – early bits in the colouring process and some of the ephemera I’ve been collecting over the last couple of years for this project.