From my sketchbook. Faces from reference.

sketch

Bowie e Mercury num só. Grande Variações :)

I calibrated my monitor but sometimes I really don't know if I did it right. Especially when it comes to all this colour and saturation. I'm never sure if I'm going over the top and I don't trust my monitor that much to help me. Anyway, this dragon needs a cuddle.

There's something wrong with this one :S I don´t quite know what, but it is irritating. It seems to me like those mountains are so off. They seem to be floating, and those edges...urghh. Anyway, it's a step up from my previous tries and I'm happy (enough) with it.

The reason why the arm is so big is that I started the sketch from a low perspective :S Only when I finished I realized that with all the shadow the sense of perspective was lost and that arm now looks ridiculously big.

Chewing more than i can swallow :S Still, could have been worst...

Snow Lizard - Very dangerous, very exotic.

May the Force be with the fish.

2 hours. This one was a good fluke :)

Elephant Cave

toothache

doodles

quick studies (from Kurosawa)

sketch

SO SAY WE ALL!!!

sketch

more sketches

BW sketch

Colour sketches

I really wish I had some kind of process to go through whenever I start painting. I mean, the drawing I finish quite quickly and usually I'm happy with it, but the painting process takes me days and it's sooooo frustrating. I do and redo and redo again...urgh!!

Anyway, that's why I'm happy with this one. Because for a couple of days I thought I was going to give up on it and in the end it came through :) It's the third one for my bunch of child illustrations. It's called 'The little Princess voyage'. I don't know where she's going but it's probably somewhere secret because not only she's travelling at night, she's also going through the misty lakes where all kind of strange creatures live. Well, I guess she'll be alright :)

One friend told me that it would be nice to know a bit about the creatures I paint. I think he's right, even more because their stories are always in my head. It's a good exercise for me to write it down.

So here it is my second children illustration. It's called 'The cat learns to read'. The cat asked the mouse to teach him how to read but the mouse only said yes after the cat promised to stop treating him like walking food.

A couple of months ago I was doing my research of children illustrators in a book store. I noted the names of the illustrators I liked, so I could later check their sites or blogs on the net. One of those illustrators was Shirley Benitez. Anyway, I'm trying to build a portfolio to send to children book editors and this last Christmas in her blog, Shirley showed an extensive walk trough her creative process. I took the time to do something I rarely do and wrote a thanking comment. But the best of it was that she visited my blog too and left me a comment, and I now have one more follower in my blog :):):) So maybe it isn't everyone's cup of tea, but when it comes to children illustration I think she really nails it :) check her work here;- http://shirleysillustrations.blogspot.com/

And here is 'The Dragon has a cold'. This is my first serious try into children illustration. This dragon was stealing sheep from the villages around and everyone thought he was eating them. Turns out that he only wanted to knit a warm scarf

not really finished, can't really bother...

This last unfinished one was a try at a more child like illustration. the idea at the beginning was also to pay a bit more attention to the composition.