Some New Stuff

I recently finished a couple of books that were for the educational market. For both of them the time frame was really short and the images had to be pretty specific, but they ended up being fun to work on. The main challenge for me with a short deadline and lots of images is that you have to design for the time you have. Usually I like to put in as many details as possible, but with these it is all about simplifying and making the images easy to understand. I've noticed that when I'm painting faster the over all colors end up being brighter.

This one is from Rudyard Kipling's "Just So Stories" for Compass Education.



These two were from "The Three Little Pigs" for Benchmark Education.

Mr. Lincoln

Recently I read part of a biography on Abraham Lincoln and it inspired the sketch below. He was an extremely interesting man with a face that just begs to be drawn.

I can't believe it has been a month since I posted anything! I've been working on a couple of projects but I can't show anything from them yet, so here is a promo sketch that I've been working on in my spare time. There are a few things to fix and hopefully I'll get it painted in the next couple of weeks.

When pigs fly...... or at least try to!

This has been sitting next to my desk for quite awhile waiting to get painted , and finally I had a chance to get it all finished. 13x19 acrylic on watercolor paper

(click it to see it bigger)
(detail)
(line drawing)

Doodles

It's been a little while since I posted anything, so here are some random people sketches from a little while ago. It is always crazy the variety of people you see while riding bart.

New site

Finally got the redesigned website up and running. This time I tried to make it real simple so that I will actually update it. I'm still making changes and adjustment to get it exactly the way I want it. I will be adding some more work in the next couple weeks, but it is working so check it out.

www.markmeyersart.com

Illustration Friday- Wrinkles

It's always fun to draw a wrinkled elephant, especially when he is the main mode of transportation for a group of escaping circus monkeys. This is an illustration from a couple of months ago and it is acrylic on watercolor paper (click on it to see it bigger).

I've been pretty busy lately and haven't had much time to work on my own stuff. So I thought I'd post a couple illustrations that I already had scanned in.

Save for web

I don't know if other people have struggled with this but it seems like every time I used the 'save for web' function in photoshop it would severely wash out my colors , and would tend to lighten the values. The portrait below is what it would do to most of my images.So I started looking around and found out that if you switch the profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 before saving it fixes the problem. I didn't notice that it changed the color at all (below image). This is probably common knowledge and I am just dumb, but I'm so glad I found this out. I used to try and compensate for the drop by adjusting the curves and saturation before saving for the web. However it never did work very well and when I look at most of the images on my website they are suffering. I guess it is better late than never to figure this out.

More website stuff

I finally had a couple days to do some work of my own while I was waiting for approval on some sketches. These are the first digitally painted pieces that I have done in a really long time, and surprisingly enough I had a lot of fun doing them.


For the new website I'm hoping to have it streamlined enough that there isn't any loading time between pages. However for those who are on really slow connections I figured this would be better than staring at a white screen. Now I just need to squeeze out enough time to get all of the site put together. Well sketches are approved so I will be way busy for the next couple weeks and this will all be put aside for a while.

Self Portrait

I've been slowly getting things together to redesign and update my website. This is the line drawing for a little self portrait for the bio section on my site. It is always kind of weird for me to draw myself. I really don't know how much it actually looks like me, but it works. I'll post the colored version as soon as I have a chance to paint it.

New Illustrations/First Post

These are a couple of illustrations I finished a while ago and haven't had a chance to put on my website.