MrBiggs dot comBrian Biggs illustration

Yesterday I showed the process leading up to the cover of Everything Goes: On Land. Without further ado or brouhaha, here's the final cover of the book. Click the image to see it quite a bit larger.

The cover design had to be indicative of the work that's in the book, and I do believe it is. Cars and trucks, bikes and motorcycles, buses, construction vehicles, trains, and whatever else made it in the book and on this cover. Vehicles going this way and that way, all kinds of people riding and driving them, and even a friend's blue and white striped Mini Cooper.

Once the final sketch was approved, I use that as the basis to create the inked drawing. I usually try to create my illustrations to the exact size that they'll be printed. Everything Goes is going to be a big book — twelve inches tall and ten inches wide — so this was no problem. I draw the illustration using a big lightbox on nice Strathmore 500 series bristol with watered-down india ink, and use white gouache to carve out areas and add details.

If you take a look at the close-up image below, the wheels of the train, the white outlines of the train windows, the railroad ties, and the wing of the small black bird are examples of where I paint the negative space, or the white areas. When I inked the drawing, the area under the train was solid black. This part of the process is easily my favorite, as it's a real joy to see these details appear and everything come together.

You may also notice that there is no type on the black-and-white line drawing. This is because when I do work like this I always draw the type and add it digitally.

Once these are all complete, they get scanned into the computer where I use Photoshop to color everything and piece it together. When it's complete, I save it as a TIF file and send it to the designer at the publishing house (Balzer+Bray/HarperCollins in the case of Everything Goes).

Everything Goes: On Land is scheduled to be released on September 13. I'm currently working on book two of the series, which is called "In the Air," and which will be published a year later. Lastly, "On the Sea" will come out in 2013. I don't have the covers sketched for either of these two books yet, but they will be similar in idea and business to "On Land." And of course I'll post here about them when they're ready to make their way into the world. Stay tuned!

I got done drawing and inking the pages of Everything Goes just in time, as it was really starting to be a tedious chore. Oddly, the inking part of a project is always the most satisfying part of a book. Especially after the ink goes down and I get to use the white gouache to carve out the details. However with the small brushes and the lightbox and the 8 hours a day doing this, my arm was hurting. Like really hurting. So I was greatly relieved when the final touches were put on the trains and I could move on to the color.
Coloring a book like this has its ups and downs. Right now its all ups and I'm really liking the way it's looking. Here for a little Christmas bonus are cropped sections from two of the big spreads in Everything Goes. You get taxis and other cars "with jobs" and you get trucks.

Happy Christmas everyone, and Happy New Year.

I'm in the downhill run of completing the first book of the Everything Goes series. Everything Goes: On Land will be published next year by Balzer + Bray, an imprint of HarperCollins. I thought I'd post a few pieces of the illustrations as I complete them. These are just line-art and aren't colored yet. They are small snippets of these huge 20-inch x 12-inch spreads that are just full of all kinds of trucks and cars and bikes and cars and motorcycles and more cars. And trains. But I haven't got to the trains yet.

More of these to come.

Did I mention cars? To prove that I am indeed a alive and working, here are a couple of recently-completed development sketches for this huge book project I'll be working on for some time…

I'm now deep deep into the initial phase of a very large book project that will take me the next 3+ years to complete. Without giving away too much, I get to draw cars and trucks and ships and airplanes and buses and tugboats and RVs and helicopters and bicycles and… you get the idea. These were drawn with ballpoint pen at a local coffee shop on Thursday last week. Stay tuned for more.

Buried deep in a few big book projects, so here are a couple of sketches, not from anything. These are each about an inch wide and tall, drawn in ballpoint.