dantat.com: The Art Process of "Fire! Fuego! Brave Bomberos!"

The art for this book was special experience for me. I had always wanted to do a fireman book and I've also been dying to experiment with something new in my artwork, so when I got the call for this project I jumped at the chance.

The main idea I wanted to handle with this book was to make the artwork interact with the fire and water in the story with the idea being that the pages in the book were so close to the fire that it burned the pages and when the firemen came in with their hoses the water would make the ink in the artwork bleed off the paper. First off, I tried out this simple sample of drawing two firemen.......

Then I followed it up by adjusting the art by altering it digitally and incorporating it with burned pieces of paper like so....

I wanted to keep in mind that the burns and watermarks are supposed to supplement the artwork and not overwhelm the page and take center stage. In the book the burn marks gradually dissipate as the fire goes out until you are left with only water stains and smoke.

I don't normally go out for photo reference shoots, but in this case accuracy was pretty important and so I went out with my son on a field trip to the nearby fire station and I also gathered parent hours for the school. DOUBLE SCORE!

I usually work entirely in Photoshop but a good part of this project would require me going back to using traditional mediums to create textures

I applied watercolor onto paper to create the grainy haze you see in an ember filled sky. I also used it to handle smoke effects. I created many texture samples to get the right effect...

For the burn marks I actually burned pieces of paper in my basement and scanned in the edges....

The water marks were a little more difficult. I completed the artwork unaltered on my computer. I then printed out a copy of that artwork and then using an eyedropper and a cup of water I created puddles of water to make the color in the art print bleed and appear as if it had been damaged by water from the water hose. After that I scanned in the waterlogged image and incorporated it into the work and then added the burn treatments on top of that using Photoshop.