Color your own Pumpkin Dream

Having great fun this year at Bindlegrim studios working on dimensional art and lanterns, yet there are, as a reminder to self, at least a couple of new print projects in the ol' bindle that need to be accomplished before the summer is done!

One, previously mentioned, is self-publishing short story writings under the working title "Sketchbook of Straw" and it is hoped this might be a series of small books containing perhaps a few stories and poems in subsequent volumes. The first volume will definitely contain two works titled "The Herbivorous Witch" and "The Jitter Dance", while two other stories are near completion with working titles "Ol' Bugbag" and "The Thief of Pumpkin Heart".

Project two, is converting last year's Halloween poem "The Pumpkin Dream" into a large format coloring book.  Here are a few examples from what would be a book of about 40 drawings:


As background to this, while working on the original book , I had felt the simple graphic designs of the original art style would be appropriate for outlining in black and white - allowing the kid at heart to choose their own color palette. (And since I've previously had some great fun creating free 8-page downloadable coloring books while working at Microsoft) it seemed like a natural progression. And so I've begun work on transforming the original art from The Pumpkin Dream into outlines, and am about halfway there!

Stay tuned for more news of publish dates for these two projects as the summer passes, when the air begins to whisper of the expectations of the fall holiday season.Until then Bindlegrim is stubbornly trying to doze the summer away beneath the drone of the cicadas. Wake up, Bindlegrim!

A Brief History of the Pumpkin Dream: (Part 6) - Swing You Sinners!

Continued from:
A Brief History of The Pumpkin Dream: (Part 5) - Monsters from the Id

Okay, so finally, I found my way to the end solution for illustrating this book project - Inkscape (a vector-art freeware program). Contrary to the shading and modeling of images occurring in the previous blog (with Corel Painter 11), the actual goal was to create simply-designed characters that could be easily manipulated for every eight lines of the poem, whenever a new image was needed.

Coming from years of working will Adobe Illustrator (and still a bit sad about Illustrator not being compatible on the new system) the learning curve was frustrating. I slowed down quite a bit to read the software instructions, and decided to at first just try to work with simple shapes - combining them, splitting them, playing with the line points, etc - which wasn't too far from my final goal. And here are a couple of the early character drafts with Inkscape :

Our main character here in mouse outfit.

Trick-or-Treat Witch
(Olive Green absolutely only accepts coven-approved sweets).

Duo of Trickster-Treaters

Also, at this time, I was re-ingesting lots of 1930s animation for inspiration (see end images part 4). In particular, I have always been fascinated with 1930's Fleischer Studios (Koko the Clown, Bimbo, Betty Boop). I would set the screen on freeze, and pencil sketch the images.

The next test was to see how well I could recreate characters from source sketches. I had sketched the tree below from a great little piece called "Swing you Sinners" (see YouTube video below) that involves a character who finds a soul full of trouble when he gets caught in a graveyard. The character below is one of the singing trees in the graveyard, and it turned out that InkScape was nice for pen-tracing sketched characters with the Wacom.

(Also, click here to view my old-school Halloween animation playlist)

So between the tree (with a few borrowed and scattered limbs), and maybe the walking house near the end, etc., together with tons of old school Halloween inspiration... the image below was my first of a few versions that finally culminated in the final style for the imagery:

(The North Wind (Peter Max ala Saw) was nixed here for a more Halloween-ish sky).

Whew, well this generally decided, this then started two months of intense illustrating! For every eight lines of poetry,  my goal was to create a drawing - 37 illustrations in all...., so, as far as the blog is concerned, I think from here I'll take a break on this whole "history" of the book set-up and maybe just dabble in a bit of postings about sketch to digital translations... perhaps...