B1C10

Solid C+

It's embarrassing to admit, but I tried to pull a Tolkein.

Not in the well-known "making up my a language for my fantasy world" sense, but in a less well-known "making beautiful illustrations" sense.

You see, Tolkein made these beautiful illustrations to go along with his Lord of the Rings books.

I saw this and thought, hmm, maybe I should try to make illustrations for my book.

Mine are not nearly as good, which is disappointing, but on the bright side:

  1. I hadn't worked with watercolors in maybe two decades, and now I have more experience than I did before.
  2. I haven't drawn anything except doodles in maybe a decade, and now I have more experience than I did before.
  3. I have gotten better with practice! Compare my first drawing in a decade to my latest:
This is kinda trash: the mountain is blending into the ground, the trees are the wrong shape, the sky is too pink. Also, a small toy car is supposed to be the focal point, but it is too small to be easily visible, let alone noticeable.
This is obviously not Tolkein-level, but it does fix the obvious flaws the previous version had.

If my books ever become popular enough that I don't need a day job anymore, I'd like to spend a week trying to create a Tolkein-level illustration.

In the meantime, here are some draft sketches.

This is the first page I sketched this decade. I used the top half of the page to figure out the composition and elements, and the bottom half to figure out how to use watercolor pencils, which I've never used before. The finished product is the tree painting above.
Testing out different rocket shapes. It's very hard to draw a not-phallic rocket.
Trying to draw a parade. I'm not sure why I added that bunny in there.

I selected watercolors because most watercolor paintings don't have a lot of detail or texture or shading. The colors are sort of blobby and indistinct, and the key is just to paint within the lines and pick nice colors.

Bill Watterson is the GOAT.

Weak B?

Turns out I'm not Bill Watterson (or Tolkein, if you hadn't figured that out yet). I thought I could live with my paintings' imperfections, but a few months later, I realized that I couldn't. I can't be trusted with colors and brushes, it was time to go back to greyscale and pens.

Finished rocket painting. This one is fine, but not excellent. Maybe the biggest issue is that it doesn't convey the scale of the rocket.
Finished parade painting. I wanted the background buildings to be kooky and futuristic (e.g., tree-shaped) but I can't draw well enough for that. Also, the extreme perspective here was really challenging.

I replaced these with the line drawings you've seen in the early chapters.

Example from B1C5.

These aren't amazing, but they are much less embarrassing.

To animate the finished pictures, I used the Parallax Engine library. I was a bit worried at first because the library hasn't had a code update in 3+ years, but it still works well, so good job to the creators there!