Moonblood Illustration Process

Some of you may know that I am also an artist. I used to teach art classes to children and adults and also painted portrait commissions for a couple of years there! But my true love is for illustration. When I went to college, I studied both illustration and English Lit. with the hope of one day writing and illustrating my own stories.

Well, the writing is happening on a professional level . . . not so much the illustrating. But, my Rohan gave me a gorgeous art studio after we got married, so I figured I might as well start dabbling a little bit in that side of my creativity again! Thought you all might like to see the development of one of my illustrations.

This is a collage-style acrylic painting for Moonblood, book 3 in the Tales of Goldstone Wood. Here is the initial sketch and beginning of the base coats. I kept the sketch very minimal since most of the details will happen in the paint. The color blocking I did in gouache.

And here it is completely blocked, all the various characters in place. Oh, dear! I have to be careful not to name names! Don't want to spoil the next book or two for everyone. Well, the cat at least you will recognize from Heartless. Monster is looking very smug here in his base coats, isn't he?



Here you see the first layers of acrylics going down. I always start with either a blue or a purple undertone for skin, thus the corpsy look for the girl! Probably too much detail in the unicorn for this early on. Oh well! The forest was probably the hardest part for me . . . I'm used to portraits, but landscapes are not my thing. Had to experiment a couple of times before finally hitting on the right undertones. Monster looks smugger than ever with his first layers of gold!

Oh no! She went goth! Actually, I realized her mouth was the wrong shape and had to reconstruct it.



Now she has highlights! Less goth though, right? And you can see that the forest is starting to develop nicely . . .

Flesh tones for her. And the Hunter is starting to come into his creepy own! He has a bit of a batman-esque quality to him. Not sure if that's what I was going for, but okay!

Now for the tiny queen. I kept putting her off because she was SO tiny, I wasn't sure how I would paint her! Even considered painting her out for a while there. Glad I didn't though. She adds a nice ghostly touch:



Now for the unicorn and Monster. They've patiently waited long enough in their base coats. Looking much handsomer now:

Here you an see the rose getting redder and stars starting to emerge. But she's looking a bit pasty. I wanted a moonlit glow, but she kind of looks sick. Besides, she's described as having golden skin in the novel . . .

Okay, that's better. And finished too! I gave her a bit more color and reconstructed aspects of her face as well. Added some ominous mist, and voila! The first illustration I've done in years! I think my favorite part is Monster. But then, I'm always partial to the cats!



So nice to get back into a bit of painting. Just for the fun of it, I made an advertisement!

This was a purely for-fun project, not professional work. Hope you enjoyed watching it develop!