Hello, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Joyous Kwanzaa, Happy Boxing Day, and well wishes all around, seriously! I'm particularly joyous at the moment, not only because my most difficult grad school semester yet is now over, but because my winter break affords me precious free moments to invest in a new freelance project called "Mary Mary Quite," or "MMQ" for short. I touched upon this in my last post, having shared one of my rough sketches that went into the very beginning stages of the project. Now I'm finally ready to start my first batch of paintings! But before I do, I thought I'd share some of the line work that will lay the foundation for these images. Enjoy the pencil drawings while they last because soon they'll be all filled in with water color.
To be fair, these images won't be in "color" per se, since MMQ is actually going to be released as a kindle book. On an e-ink screen, these images will appear in gray-scale. So rather than making these in full color and crossing my fingers hoping that they look OK on a kindle screen, I decided to paint all of these in sepia (here's a good example by another artist). Thus, I'll be all the more aware of value-relationships throughout the process while nonetheless creating images that look good both in e-ink and LCD contexts.
But now, on to the more interesting bit - what is MMQ? Each of the images above illustrates a different short story taken from the rich treasury of previously published prose by an author named Mary Huckstep. Although now primarily working as a screenplay writer and professor, she's also set some time aside to re-release a series of humorous, motherhood-inspired short stories as a kindle book compilation. Having once made residence only across disparate pages of newspaper , these stories will now dwell together in the comfy abode of an ebook brimming with illustrations by yours truly.
