Hello! First of all – You might have noticed the changes around here. I’m just trying out some new things.  Everything should pretty much be where I left it, but please let me know if I messed something up.

Now for the thing I was going to talk about. Remember the scarecrow project? It’s still on, in case you were in doubt. In the more likely case that you have no idea what the scarecrow project is: I’m illustrating a song, and it’s about scarecrows. This is the tryout-illustration I’ve been basing the rest of this on:

The original plan was to have a few different illustrations in a sequence that goes along with the song, to be put on youtube. But as that is clearly some sort of music video, I would love to be able to get some animation in there. Not much, but maybe just a crow flapping its wings would make such a difference, and it would be so cool if I could do that! The problem is just that I have no idea how to do that, so this is all just a big experiment.
I’ve been thinking more than I’ve been painting on this one. And finally, I have reached a plan. It’s probably the least effective one I could come up with, but it’s still a plan.

The idea is to first put together the actual scenes. But instead of drawing them one by one, I figure it will save me some time to put them together in photoshop instead. Since I’m so modern I recently learned some things about photoshop (but still no animation program) I now have the powers to that kind of stuff!
Anyways, I put the main pictures together, with the help of the started pieces above, and then I’ll be tampering with them. Like moving the arms and change the crows here and there.  I’m pretty sure I’ve overseen a much more efficient way to go about the crows, but now this is it.

I’ve laid the brown pencil aside and moved back to ink on this one. For the only reason that it makes the cropping-everything-out-part so much faster. It’s a shame, in a way, because I really like the softer style with this motive. But this is already such a huge project, and if I were to make it even harder for myself there’s the chance that I’d give up and quit. So I’m making it as easy as I can for now. Just for now.

Here are all the finished pieces together. And yes, I did notice that four of those crows are in there twice. No worries, I’m on it.
I didn’t make the whole heads for those last three expressions. Since they’re all in pretty much the same pose as the first two, I think it will be enough just to put those in there, and move the head slightly. I Should have thought of that before I put all that time into sketching those heads…

Now for the exciting experiment-part of the whole thing, which I’ve actually already gotten started on:

I believe this is going to take quite a while, but I really have no idea.

Wish me luck :)

Em