Carrie Mac | Carrie Mac

One of our favourite knock-knock jokes goes like this:

Knock, knock.

Who’s there?

Owl.

Owl, who?

Owl always love you.

Once Esmé understood how ‘owl’ is a play on ‘I’ll,’ she ran with it. One of the ones she came up with had the very sweet punchline of “Owl always read to you.”

Which inspired this illustration, which now hangs above one of the bookshelves we keep for library books.

I don’t pull a radio flyer wagon to the library, and I don’t have an apron that cute, and I don’t let Esmé perch atop the 100 books we take out each week, and I don’t make Hawk push it home either. But I do pull a really ugly Rosler, and yes it can carry 100 books. And Esmé does often read on the walk home. And Hawk is usually quite eager to help push.

I experimented with butcher paper for this illustration, and used Micron pens and Prismacolour pencils.

I love seeing how artists work, so here’s a glimpse into my process for all of you studio snoops and creative-process junkies.

See you later, excavator! is a commissioned illustration, and because the customer wanted the text incorporated onto the image and a finished image “like it’s out of a picture book,” I finished it in Photoshop, which is handy for this post, so that I can show you an illustration from start to polished-for-print finished. A lot of my work is sold as originals, and never gets surgically operated on in Photoshop, so this is a good one for show-and-tell.

Some of the tools I used:

mechanical pencils
Rexel Cumberland pencils: 5H, HB, 2B
my trusty Staedler mars plastic eraser … so much erasing
Moleskine sketchbooks (small one and big one)
design vellum (for tracing)
light table (the ever so useful light table)
Prismacolor Premier coloured pencils
Derwent burnisher
Micron Pigma pens (05 & 08, to be specific)
Pentel brush pen (decided against that effect … see below)
Epson scanner, MacBook Pro, Wacom table (WHOOT!), and Photoshop.
Strathmore Bristol smooth surface artists paper, 400 series
Scissors, glue stick, coffee & McVities biscuits. Not kidding.

Phew.

First, research. Thank you, Google images.

Very rough sketches in the little sketchbook.

More sketching and messing about in the big sketchbook. Played with profiles, positioning, googly-eyes, expressions. Cut and paste, erase, erase, erase. Did I mention that I love my erasers? I have a whole jar of them in various sizes and compositions.

Then out comes the vellum so that I can play with the final layout, and try out any changes I might make. For example, the crawler tracks were WAY different in the first sketches. This is when I tried out the ink brush, and decided that I didn’t like it for this illustration.