Here’s another lovely piece by Kirsten Harper, who illustrated “Duet” for us a couple of weeks ago. The version on the home page is stripped down and cropped. Do visit the story page to see the whole thing.
Today, I’m looking at stock illustration sites, for a story that’s to run on Friday for which I have zilch. Any suggestions? I’ve started with StockFinder.
That’s lovely, nicer than the last one, IMO. The photographic paper dress and the blue, kinda ball point pen, make it.
I really like the crumpled paper, too, but it’s the quality of the lines in the dresses hanging behind her that really does it for me.
When Kirsten sends her sketches, we all ooh and ah and say, “Oh, it’s so hard to pick one,” and then I can’t imagine what the hell she could possibly do to the sketch we chose, to make it more finished—they look beautiful to me as is. But then the finished piece comes, and it’s even better.
Actually, that’s been true with all three illustrators I’ve worked with so far. Maybe I’m just a sucker for loose drawings.
Clicking through stock art sites all afternoon was pretty depressing—most of it looked so irredeemably stock: tight, generic, stylized. You could never identify the artist without looking at the credit. (This was not the case on StockFinder, but it was almost everywhere else I looked.) I ended up going to Flickr and spending five minutes to find a photo for the piece I was trying to illustrate. (My life is so much easier since Brian W. cooked up that Flickr Creative Commons search bookmarklet for me.)
Damn yo, why you gotta playa hate like that. You want more illustrators you could use instead of me? Kidding, nice work there!
Aw, Aaron, you’ll always be the first illustrator in my heart.