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Day: September 14, 2018

AppleTree marathon artwork color full-josh cleland

Illustration process video for Appletree Marathon artwork

September 14, 2018

If you’ve ever been curious about the illustration process, I made a time-lapse video showing the creation from beginning to … Read more

Categories General Greetings, Illustrations

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joshcleland

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👇REGISTRATIONS OPEN FOR MY CHILDREN'S BOOK COURSES👇

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Sep 5

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Shape language reveals a lot about your character. Oval shapes tend to represent friendly, approachable characters, while triangles and angles tend to represent villainous characters. You can also mix shapes to provide subtle foreshadowing. For instance, if your character is a mean jerk at the start of the story, but then learns to be nice at the end, you may have a sharp head shape, but big, round soft eyes, and maybe a soft body shape.

For more tips like this join one of my courses on character design and children’s books. Enrollment is open for a limited time. Link is in my bio. See you there!

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Sep 4

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Character design tip: Before drawing your character, draw out a single motion line. This line will serve as your “line of action”. Basing your character’s movement on this line helps simplify the drawing and makes it much more cohesive and fun! Give it a try. Don’t worry if it feels a little bit unnatural at first. In fact, I have to continually remind myself to use this tip. But when I do, I’m much more happy with the end result.

Want more tips and tricks like this? I have a few courses now open for registration for a limited time. All three courses center around character design and children’s books. You can find more info through the link in my bio. See you there!

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Sep 3

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Enrollment is now open, and I’d love to welcome you in!
Registrations for my courses on character design and children’s book illustration are now open! These were created to help you develop strong, consistent artwork from idea to finished pages.

I’ll teach you how to:

Design expressive, repeatable characters for children’s books

Illustrate full scenes that support storytelling

Create clean, professional-looking artwork step by step

This is not about shortcuts or trends. It’s about building real skills you can use again and again. If your goal is to illustrate with more confidence and clarity, this is the place to start!

Enroll now and start building your children’s book portfolio! Link is in my bio.

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Aug 24

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After a week of vacation I’m back in the studio. Lots of stuff coming up! Can’t wait to share more! The artwork on my screen is Santa In Disguise, written by @cynthiaplattbooks and published by @harperkids . Pre-orders available now. Link in my bio.

#kidlitartist #kidlitillustration #childrensbooks

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Aug 12

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Found some framed prints I did over 10 years ago. I think they still make a nice addition to the studio.

#kidlitartist #kidlitillustration #workspace

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Jul 29

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Drawing a forest scene. More to come. 😊

#kidlitartist #kidlitart #characterdesign #workspace

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Jul 27

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I’ll be holding another free character design workshop this Wednesday, July 29 at 2pm Pacific / 5pm Eastern. All you need is something to draw with (pencil/paper, iPad, etc…) and your imagination. Registration link in my bio. Hope to see you there!

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Jul 20

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I finally got around to drawing Jimothy. Question: was Jimothy named from an episode of The Office?

#jimothy #kidlitart #characterdesign #jimothyart

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Jul 17

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Morning warmup doodles 😊.

#kidlitart #kidlitartist #characterdesign #childrensbooks

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Jul 13

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Some artwork I did last Fall for a possible book. In the end the publisher went in a different direction, which is the way it goes sometimes. Oh well.

#kidlitartist #kidlitillustration

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Jul 3

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A little board book I illustrated recently. Like many of you, I’m feeling quite melancholy this 4th of July. But I do love this country, and remain hopeful that we will see better days. Plus, we have really good ice cream. 😊 Happy 4th of July! Published by @simonandschuster

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Jun 30

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#JuneCharacterADay day 30: Lemur helping someone. It’s the final day!!! Congratulations to everyone who participated 🎉🎈🎂 I hope you had fun and created some characters that you’re proud of. Remember, you can always go back and revise the characters that you like, and explore them further. I’ll be doing that for a few of these.

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Jun 29

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#JuneCharacterADay day 29: Lion eating ice cream. Just one more day to go!!!

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Jun 28

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#JuneCharacterADay day 28: Gorilla riding a tricycle. It’s the last couple of days. Let’s finish strong 💪!

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Jun 27

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#JuneCharacterADay day 27: Chameleon marching in a parade. I can’t believe there’s only a few days left! It’s been amazing seeing everyone’s fun characters. It’ll be sad when it’s over.

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Jun 26

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#JuneCharacterADay day 26: Wildebeest flying with balloons. I think this may be a good start to a birthday card 😊.

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Jun 25

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#JuneCharacterADay day 25: Anteater tap-dancing. Unfortunately I haven’t had a lot of time this week to work on these due to upcoming deadlines, but doing my best 😊.

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Jun 24

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#JuneCharacterADay day 24: sloth sprinting.

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Jun 23

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I used today’s #JuneCharacterADay prompt during a live character design class I held this afternoon. It was about of fun! If you’re interested in future webinars sign up in my bio.

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Jun 22

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#JuneCharacterADay day 22: zebra archaeologist.

#kidlitart #kidlit #characterdesign

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josh@clelandillustration.com
971-205-2283
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