I got gum. There's gum...

...and that post title was brought to by Sandra Bullock in Speed.  (movie nerd five!) Anyways I felt like it was time for a new header image up top.  I like to change it up once in awhile it helps keep things fresh and lets the reader(s?) know I'm still very much into anything and everything WIWL. 

My first header was a generic design that came with blogger that I used as a block template.  I didn't do anything fancy but cut and paste some images from the first book into the grid segments.  I liked it so much at the time that I made a business card version.  Eventually I got tired of it because it felt like the student version of me designed this.  It lacked the fun and silliness the books were all about.

The next header was an idea taken from a page in When You Were Little.  I had done an image where I drew my first completed drawing and was surrounded by crumbled up pieces of paper.  I thought it would be a cool idea to take that page and rework it so it's of me actually drawing rather than holding a piece of paper.

Here's the page followed by the design of the header:

I thought this image was great and it gave the people look at my blog an idea of how pages look in the series.  Now after doing a header this way, I thought it would be a cute idea to consider the header as a page in a book or a Signature print.  I can do a quick drawing and throw up a fun yet slightly embarrassing memory of myself.

If you notice my art style has changed slightly.  Something I started to do more since the release of Coloring. I am using inked lines and really making them sweeping and curvy.  It gives the drawings more sense of movement and the lines really flow through the entire image.  I like to make the outer lines thicker and use thinner inks to almost enclose the details within the fluidity of the heavier inks.

I am inking these drawings pretty heavily I wanted the colors to be simple.  I wanted it to look like a cartoon and use very little brush work in Photoshop.  This is different from how I color the books because I don't ink my drawings and I really like to put a lot of details in the color work with brush effects, gradients, and etc.  Since the next WIWL project ISN'T a book (whaaaaa) I really wanted to move away from the series' style and expand upon the ink work I did in Coloring.

Here's the finished image for the header above and the look you can expect from the new WIWL:

Also, going back to that slightly embarrassing but fun memory of me. Yes, I did get gum stuck in my hair.  Yes, I also did rock the bowl cut.  Can you say Booty Traps?

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