Illustrator Saturday – Gerald Kelley

Gerald Kelley is a professional illustrator whose clients include Price Stern Sloan, Scholastic, Macmillan, Hearst, and Teen Magazine. His work has been featured in children’s educational materials, short-story magazines and corporate publications.

Gerald is the illustrator of the ABC picture book, T IS FOR TURKEY and, ‘A IS FOR AMERICA’ both written by Tanya Stone and PUSS IN BOOTS coming out this fall from Barron Educational Series.

Born in Texas, Gerald currently resides in South Florida where it’s far too humid and where he spends way too much time indoors.

Gerald says, “I’ve been doing professional illustration work in one form or another since 1996. Most of that time has been spent doing client work as a sideline to my 9-5 job.  I transitioned into illustration as my full-time focus and have been able to split time between drawing and marketing with varying degrees of success, but I found this a bit frustrating. While I didn’t suffer from a lack of work, it was a challenge keeping myself off the see-saw of no work or too much work. So I started to check out various illustration agents and signed with The Bright Group. Based in the UK, Bright has an office in New York. Having access to both the US and international markets piqued my interest and was something I wanted to explore. The other great thing is their subsidiary office, Heartfelt, handles licensing work which is another area of interest.”

You will find two videos that demonstrate how Gerald works at the bottom of the post, so don’t miss watching them.  Below is an interview of Gerald Kelley.  All three are excellent.

Work-in-Progress to Final Art

ORGE OF RUSHOMON Work-in-Progress to Final Art

RATCATCHER Work-in-Progress to Final Art

Legend of Sleepy Hollow character sketches

AUTUMN READING Work-in-Progress to Final Art

Making of Friendly Rats

Medieval Foods

Illustrations from Gerald’s new book PUSS IN BOOTS coming out this fall.

I don’t think I’m alone when I say that my path as an illustrator has been heavily influenced not only by illustrators of the past and present but also animated movies and television shows. I grew up in the golden age of Saturday morning cartoons–The Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show; Scooby Doo; The Jetsons; The Superfriends; Robotech. And every Saturday morning kicked off several hours of tense stand-off with my mom as she maniacally enforced a weekly cleaning schedule that saw me shouldering the heavy burden of cleaning the bathrooms and dusting everything. I wasn’t very subtle in my attempts to sneak in cartoon watching as I worked. And by working I mean sitting on the couch, remote in-hand. Parents never understood the need for cartoons.

Anyway, one of the legacies of this horribly stress-filled childhood has been a desire to eventually include character design for animation as part of my path as an illustrator. One of the steps I’ve recently taken toward that goal has been to enroll in Stephen Silver’s Character Design course hosted on Bobby Chiu’s Schoolism site. I’m currently in the midst of Week 6 of the course and I’m being challenged and learning TONS!

One of the biggest things I’ve learned is the importance of pushing past your first several designs until you break out of the self-imposed limitations of initial ideas. Given the limited schedule of most illustration projects, I generally tend to rely on my first few ideas so I can get on with meeting the deadlines. I’ve always known the importance of pushing ideas but I’ve also fallen victim to the need for speed and the tyranny the modern production schedule. Stephen’s class has changed that.

I’m in week 6 of classes and one of the assignments is working out designs for a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde project. We were to come up with a twist on the standard dual-personality idea and come up with the look of our characters. My idea is set in the 1920’s and Dr. Jekyll is an Oxford professor and Hyde is a self-styled adventurer type with delusions of grandeur.

Normally, my first inclination is to stop after doing only about four or five variations and then moving on. But pushing past my first ideas resulted in ideas that started moving away from my general solution patterns.

This has brought home the importance of idea exploration and the possibilities found in taking a little more time, allowing ideas to ferment and develop in ways that may surprise.

I can’t recommend Stephen’s class enough to anyone wanting to push their ideas further. He’s an amazingly talented guy and he’s developed a short course that will push you’re creativity.

Here are two videos that demonstrate how Gerald creates his illustrations.  I loved watching them.

You can see more of Gerald’s illustrations by visiting his website.  www.geraldkelley.com

Hope you enjoyed meeting Gerald Kelley and Illustrator Saturday.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy