And The Winner Is...

Well, it is the moment we have all been waiting for (or is it just me?)! With eyes squeezed shut, I drew a deep breath to steady my hand, reached deep into the twisted bramble of hopeful names, pinched ever so randomly upon the chosen tag, lifted it from my trusty herringbone hat to reveal the winner...

And the winner is my Twitter pal and brilliant illustrator, Blythe Russo! Congratulations, Blythe! I know you will give Guy Fox a happy home!

Thank you to everybody who participated, and made this give-away so fun and such a giant success! So many of you commented, liked, shared, retweeted and I truly appreciate every one of you for your support.

If you are among the folks who unfortunately did not win and would still like to have "A Fox for all Seasons" in your home, please visit my Etsy shop.

Joshua Nash Illustrations on Etsy.com

THANK YOU!!

Josh

Place of Work

I have always been fascinated when offered a peek into another artist's workspace. I imagine the space to be an extension of that artist's creative self and that it might even offer clues into understanding their creative process. For example, a cluttered studio might suggest a busy mind which finds inspiration in chaos, while a tidy space could suggest a laser-focused creative energy. I am not sure what my workspace says about my own creative process, but I am sharing it with you nonetheless. If it appears uncluttered, please note I cleaned it up before taking any pictures. Regardless, you get the basic idea!

My workspace occupies an office in my home. There is plenty of sunshine during the day which is wonderful on the weekends but not so handy on weekdays when I am working as a graphic artist for an ad agency in an entirely different location! I spend most evenings here, however, sketching, drawing, painting, googling for reference & snickering at Facebook posts and Youtube videos. I listen to music while I work, shuffling tunes by my favorite artists. My wife and I share the office and she keeps me company between catching up on her work emails. She has a brilliant eye for color and even advises me on my palette from time to time.

The tools of my trade are very basic. I sketch and draw with Primacolor Turquoise HB pencils (I prefer a hard lead for crisp, non-smudging lines!) on a Canson 65 lb 9 x 12 sketch pad. I use a Wacom Intuos 4 tablet for any digital coloring, usually for my color studies before I actually paint with water colors.

I paint using water color from Windsor & Newton tubes and wet my brushes in an old spaghetti sauce jar I've been using for 15 years. I use round sable brushes, also by Windsor & Newton, mixing my colors in a Japanese-style flower-shaped palette. I paint on Bainbridge 2200 cold-press illustration boards and I finish my illustrations with black Prismacolor Verithin colored pencils.

For reference, I rely heavily on the wonderful world of Google Images. Once I have a few thumbnails and have an idea of what sorts of characters, animals and environments I will be drawing, I go to the Google machine and search for relevant images and squirrel them away in folders on my iMac. I also find endless inspiration in my beloved library of picture books and children's literature. These books are my art school and I learn so much from studying past and present masters of the picture book genre. The middle grade books, as well as containing some amazing illustrations themselves, are full of characters and stories that keep my imagination firing on all cylinders.

All these features aside, I suppose what makes my work space special to me is that it is a comfortable and familiar sanctuary where I can retreat to and fully inhabit the most important area for an artist: that creative space that resides inside of them.

Thank you for reading and allowing me to share my work space with you, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to ask in the comments!

Josh

Summer Solstice Foxtravaganza

Friends, I would like to celebrate the first day of summer by kicking off a giveaway! Having recently listed my brand-new limited edition print series titled "A Fox for all Seasons"on Etsy.com, I could think of no better way to ring in the summer season! So, I will be giving away one set of prints to one lucky winner!

"A Fox for all Seasons" is a set of four 8 x 10 Giclée prints professionally printed on Hahnemühle Photo-rag®. This is a limited edition of 200 prints, signed and numbered by me!

Click here to see the Etsy.com listing!

All you have to do to enter the drawing is comment on this blog post and when my Facebook page reaches 300 likes, I'll select a winner!

So get commenting, liking, retweeting and sharing because the sooner we reach 300 likes, the sooner "A Fox for all Seasons" could be yours!

Good luck!

Josh

April Showers

When it rains, it pours, as the old adage goes, and this April's showers have doused me with plenty of activity which is sure to bring May flowers!

First of all, on April 6th, I attended the SCBWI Northern/Central California Spring Conference. Here I had the wonderful opportunity to hear from authors, editors, agents, art directors and illustrators from the publishing business. I attended workshops with Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers' amazing art director Laurent Linn and incredible picture book illustrator/author, John Hendrix. John talked about the importance of illustrating to one's strengths and shared with us the grueling saga of publishing his picture book "John Brown: His Fight for Freedom", a book which he described as "unpublishable". John was also kind enough to spend a few minutes with me to review my portfolio and give me some pointers on where my work was strong and where it could be stronger. Laurent's workshop spoke to the character's role in storytelling. We were asked to bring in a series of character design sketches and Laurent reviewed each illustrator's work and with his comments helped explain how "what's on the outside of a character can describe what is on the inside." My character design for The Mad Hatter is below!

April also finds me preparing for my book signing this Thursday, April 18th at Beatnik Books in Roseville! I will be signing copies of my latest book, "Moose n' Me" written by Kenny Loggins. I will be there from 6 to 8pm and to all the local readers, please stop by and say hello! I will be giving away bookmarks and even copies of Moose n' Me! I really look forward to seeing some friendly faces and hopefully making some new friends this Thursday!

Between all of that madness, I also continue work on a series of illustrations I will eventually be selling as prints. The series is based on the four seasons, and features a character I have come to call Guy Fox. All four illustrations have been sketched and I will be coloring the final pieces in the coming weeks. Seen below are all four sketches in seasonal order, beginning with Autumn. I'll be sure to share my progress with you and you'll certainly be the first to know when they are available for purchase!

Needless to say, my April showers have been of the refreshing and sustaining kind. I look forward to reporting on all of the new growth to sprout in May! Until then, thank you for reading!

Josh

Taking it Outside!

Hi folks. Just a quick blog post to share a little with you about what has been happening! First of all, I have finished the work for a picture book proposal titled "Take it Outside". "Take it Outside" begins when our hero boy wakes early on a summer morning with a hankering for the clean open air and asks us, "Who's ever heard of the 'Great Indoors'?" What follows is a rhyming rollick through field, wood and stream in which a trio of siblings meets adventure on the open path. They'll find curious animal tracks on the stream banks and watch beetles march a parade on an old rotted log.

I am currently querying literary agents and hoping to find a happy home for the book! In the meantime, enjoy a couple samples of the work...

While "Take it Outside" is looking for representation, I plan to shift gears a little and produce a series of illustrations for sale as prints. I'll be opening an online store when the time comes and you can be sure you'll be the first to hear about it! Until then, thank you for reading!

Josh

Mapping the Big Apple with Children's Lit

What is it about New York City that makes it such a likely backdrop for children's stories? Is it the urban landscape of brownstones and playgrounds that lends the perfect aesthetic? Could it be the incredible human diversity and rich history of the city that makes is such fertile fodder for compelling stories? Is it simply New York City's status as a publishing colossus that makes it a natural mecca for authors and artists? It is probably a mixture of all of these factors. Whatever the reason, after delving into a good amount of children's literature, I could not help avoiding the fact that so many of the stories took place on the fair isle of Manhattan. Whether it was Stuart Little's foray into sailboat racing on the Sailboat Pond in Central Park, or Claudia & Jamie Kincaid's temporary residence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City's grid is a veritable celebrity map of the who's who in children's literature. Take a look at the map!

Children's Literature Map of New York City

Did I miss any of your favorites? Let me know in the comments!

Josh

New Work! (And How I Did It)

Hello all. I recently finished an illustration for a picture book I am working on and thought I would share a few words on my process.

I always start with a thumbnail sketch. My thumbnails are about 3" tall. The picture book I am working on has about 15 illustrations so I draw the thumbnails within the context of the whole book. That way, as I am working on the thumbnails, I can see how they are all relating to each other and the overall flow of the book.

When I am happy with the thumbnails, I move on to a tighter, final sketch. This is the part of the process I enjoy the most. I am by nature, a drawer, so the final sketch is where I really inhabit the illustration.

With this particular sketch, however, I was not quite satisfied with some of the elements. It was almost identical in composition to the sketch that precedes it in the book, and I felt I needed to zoom out a bit to give it some intrigue.

To fix the problem, I cut the drawing up in Photoshop so I could scale and move each figure to achieve a more dynamic composition and point of view. I also dropped in a different view of the house from another sketch!

When I was happy with the Photoshop work, I printed it out and traced it onto a new sketch. You'll see that I also made some updates to the characters to make sure they were more consistent with the other drawings in the book.

Next I produced a color comp in Photoshop to make sure I had a color scheme that was working and since this is the first illustration I completed for the picture book, I was mindful of the costume colors and how they would work in other illustrations throughout the entire book.

Now it is time to paint. First, using an inkjet printer, I printed a fairly faint image of the sketch onto the cold press illustration board. I paint in watercolor. I started with an underpainting of ultramarine to determine how all the shading will be distributed.

I continue painting.

Once the painting portion was finished I drew over the illustration with a black colored pencil, to emphasize line and bring back the "drawn" quality of the original sketch.

Here is the final product. I hope you enjoyed following along, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Josh