Illustration Friday: Beneath

TGIF, everybody!  This week’s submission for Illustration Friday comes from the Lovecraft-inspired children's book The Antarctic Express.  In this scene, Professor Dyer and young Danforth discover ancient wall carvings on the walls of the Old Ones’ city, hidden deep beneath the ice of the Antarctic.  This scene is a pastiche of the scene of Santa holding up the sleigh bell from The Polar Express, which The Antarctic Express lovingly parodies, and features my nephew Emmet as Danforth.

Have a great weekend, everybody!

Illustration Friday: Subterranean

With all the dark, rainy skies and work-related projects keeping me indoors this week, I’m starting to feel like a subterranean creature myself!  I wish this week’s Illustration Friday theme had been something bright and sunny, to get me in a better mood if nothing else.

This image is one of my favorites from The Antarctic Express.  I was allowed to go creepy and a little bit scary with it, a rare treat in my field.  In this part of the story, Professor Dyer and Danforth have discovered the subterranean caverns, filled with morose albino penguins, and the decaying, ancient forms of the Elder Things.

The illustrations for this book are all graphite drawings digitally colored in Photoshop.  Have a great weekend, everyone!

Illustration Friday: Perspective

Happy Friday, everyone! This week's Illustration Friday theme is "Perspective," so I decided to post the following image from The Antarctic Express since I remember the perspective in this piece being hard to render correctly!  I had to use the “pin-and-string” method and even double -check with lines drawn in Adobe Illustrator.

I hope you all see the resemblance this scene shares with the train scene in the beginning of The Polar Express, as it is intentional. This book is a parody of Van Allsburg’s in many ways. You can read more about it at Atlas Games' website.

Have a great weekend!