Guest Post! Erika Barriga: Queen Quail is Quiet

 Today I'm happy to feature Erika Barriga, whose new book, Queen Quail is Quiet: and Other ABC Tongue Twisters, comes out today!  Her illustrations are truly delightful, and she was kind enough to stop by and share a bit of her process.

 

Queen Quail is Quiet: and other ABC Tongue Twisters came out today for e-readers for Kindle and in print!  Queen Quail is Quiet grew out of my love of learning and drawing.  I wanted to be a little different to approaching learning the alphabet. Creating a sentence illustrating each sound for every letter sounded challenging.  I started out by thinking of words for the letters and then forming a sentence I could illustrate.  Sketching of thumbnail ideas came next and was much easier to do once I realized this would no longer be just a project, but a book.  Most of the sketching was just on plain computer paper and once I refined the sketches into final artwork, I scanned in the images onto my computer.

The sketches were brought over to Adobe Illustrator as a layer.  Then I outlined everything in a bright color (easy to see and stands out) on another layer.  At this stage I think of colors and what would work for the entire book.

Then I made a copy of the outline layer and this is the layer that becomes the color layer.

Usually there is tweaking with the image just a bit (the swim cap for the duck is different from sketch to final), but I try to stay true to the original sketch since that is the foundation.  I believe it is better to sketch and erase than to work out those changes digitally on the computer. When the color is complete, I'll bring the image into Photoshop for additional little changes and finally end with applying a texture.
This book took over four years to complete from start to finish and I can't wait for my baby girl to flip through the pages.  I hope other kids will enjoy it too!

Delinquent Goldilocks

Delinquent Goldilocks came up recently from two different people I know, in two unrelated conversations.  So, here's my version.

5 legged dinosaur

The rare and mysterious 5 legged dinosaur.

You are doing fine

A hand lettered sign for those moments when you are freaking out.

Also available as wallpaper and a printable here: http://aeolidia.com/blog/2013/05/you-are-doing-fine-free-printable-by-aeolidia/

How to draw a bicycle

A little something I learned at the recent SCBWI Western Washington conference.

Announcement! I have an agent!

 

I'm pretty sure that designing this announcement was not a good use of my time.

NEVERTHELESS!

I now have an agent! I am represented by Alexandra Penfold at Upstart Crow Literary!

Birds both real and imagined

 

Bird silhouettes. I've always loved drawing birds, but I imagine these were inspired by the David Attenborough nature documentary we watched on Sunday.

Sewing Machine

A little sewing machine spot illustration that I was doing to go along with a logo.  I decided to scrap this idea, but I still liked the illustration.

Once upon a time there was a little boy

I've been super busy with projects lately and I'm not allowed to show anything yet!  In the meantime here's a sketch that's a bit on the odd side that I colored in on my breaks from my other projects.

Mega block tower!

I've been very busy drawing things for other people, but snatched a bit of time to make this for myself.  It's going to go on the flip side of my new promo postcards. Pencil + digital color.

Snowy woods, the sequel

This is what happens when you take a bit of snowy woods and repeat it using the magic of Photoshop.  And then invert it, again using the magic of Photoshop.  Instant forest scene and instant nighttime birch trees scene.

Snowy Woods

I'm working on a book cover and trying to figure out how to draw woods.  The cover is not actually a snow scene, but I liked the way it looked so I threw in some snow.

Happy Valentine's Day

Here's some foxes kissing in honor of Valentine's Day.

Watercolor birds experiment

Some quick watercolor birds; playing with wet on wet watercolor.

Faux Book Cover Project - The Poison Pen

Watercolor, pen and ink and a heck of a lot of photoshopping.

Also, please ignore the fact that she has one big hand and one teeny tiny hand.  I'm going to claim that was an artistic choice.

Faux Book Cover Project Number 3 - Snow

The third installment of my fake book cover project.  I'm not bothering to make up author names and put them on the book covers; but I did leave space for it at the bottom of this one.

I think this one was heavily influenced by one of my critique group partners, the very talented A.M. Sartor, who recently completed this cover image: http://amsartor.com/30828/984501/folio1/the-phoenix-project

Basically, it's all about the hair, as usual.

Moray Eel Pattern

A repeating pattern of moray eels and a couple of fish.  I created this using this quite simple tutorial of how to create a repeating pattern: http://www.designsponge.com/2008/05/welcome-julia-and-how-to-make-a-repeat-pattern.html

My first repeating pattern ever! Yay!

Patterning and Silhouettes

I'm trying to learn more about creating patterns.. and I'd like to introduce more patterning into my illustrations. After creating the floral pattern and the one with the snakes and the birds, I started exploring silhouettes and ended up drawing all these fish (plus one narwhal). I may go back and color these in Photoshop and add some texture, but I'm not promising anything.  These are all done with brush pen on copy paper.

Things I learned:
1. I like to draw loopy things, like snakes, squid tentacles and eels.  This also explains my love of drawing hair and chinese dragons.
2. Narwhals, puffers, and cuttlefish are all super cute.
3. My goal this year: to draw things for fun.  I have been falling into the trap of "Is this good? Is this good?" and worrying about my illustrations so much that I sometimes lose sight of why I am doing this.  God knows I'm not in it for the money.  So, even though a pattern of snakes terrifying birds may be a bit odd, I enjoyed drawing it, and you know, I'm a bit odd anyway.

Faux Book Cover 2 - Twelve Thrilling Tales of Terror

Here's the next installment of my experiment in hand drawn type and book cover illustration.

This one is watercolor and pen and ink, assembled in Photoshop.

Faux Book Cover Project - The Oni and the Fox

Well, here's something completely different from me and not really recognizable as something I'd do except for the fact that there's a fox in it.

I wanted to work on my hand-lettering skills and my book cover design skills, so I had an idea to create some fake book covers as a personal project this year. With any luck, I hope to complete at least one a month, ideally many more than that.

This one was inked with a Pentel brush pen and Micron pens, and colored digitally.  It's been a while since I inked anything; it was kind of fun. Maybe I'll have to incorporate black outlines back into my style. We'll see.

Oni, by the way, are Japanese demons.