Wylie Elise Beckert Illustration

From the Sketchbook: Bookish Posted on 22 May 2013

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Lately, I've been less than satisfied with the final color rendering on my pencil/digital pieces, and my few forays into coloring my pencil sketches in traditional media (watercolor, colored pencil) haven't delighted me much either. I'm starting to think that a lot of this stems from not taking the rendering of the pencil art far enough - while the pencil on toned paper stages make nice enough sketches, they're just not sufficient scaffolding to hang a finished piece on.

To that end, I've been playing around with softer graphite and some smudging and blending in my sketches - trying to establish final form and lighting and get a tighter render in pencil, rather than waiting on miracles that never come in the digital stage.

The bookish girl above is one such experiment from the sketchbook (ignore, if you will, its many faults). With no tweaking in Photoshop other than a slapdash red Overlay layer, I feel like it comes a lot closer to the look I'm going for in my final images than I've been getting lately. I'm looking forward to playing around with this further.

New Work: The Turnip Keeper's Lantern Posted on 20 May 2013

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(Check out the full view in the gallery.)

I've always wanted to illustrate the folktale behind the modern tradition of the jack-o-lantern - the story of a drunken sinner who, through trickery, extracts a promise from the devil never to claim his soul and is subsequently forced to wander the earth with a carved turnip containing an ember from the fires of hell to light his lonely way.

(The pencil & white charcoal sketch.)

I thought all that accursed wandering might be rendered pleasanter and more efficient with the addition of a bicycle. Unfortunately, bikes are one of those things that are both hard to draw properly from imagination AND suitably large and cumbersome that dragging an actual one up from the basement for reference purposes isn't entirely practical. My solution:


Viewing my creation, it may not alarm my readers to learn that my exemplary marks at art school were marred by a few D's in Sculpture; however, this crude model is something of a marvel of hidden engineering. Standing a full 3.5" high, it features sturdy cocktail skewer & hot glue construction and (wonder of wonders) a fully articulated front fork and handlebars for lifelike handling.

The completion of this piece also marks the happy occasion of having enough reasonable examples of my current working style that I feel comfortable starting to knock some of the older, more cartoony stuff out of my portfolio in favor of the new pieces. I always advise illustrators just starting out to chisel their portfolios down to the bare relevant minimum, but for some reason I have a hard time doing it myself until I have something better to replace it with.

On the bright side, it's nice to be able to look at my current work against stuff from 2011/2012 and see a marked improvement - it gives me hope for 2014 and beyond.

New Work: Nest Posted on 12 May 2013

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A little illustration for Mother's Day.

(The pencil & white charcoal sketch.)

New Work: Cat Print Posted on 02 May 2013

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A small project, but one with a cat on it, so it counts double. An image for online print shop CatPrint, which was looking to create an illustrated flyer for the Philadelphia Comic Con to show off the company's art printing capabilities.

The original sketch (pencil & white charcoal on tinted paper) and the finished flyer.

Some Daily Sketches Posted on 20 Apr 2013

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I tend to overwork personal pieces - setting myself up for failure by choosing an enormous canvas ("Oh, this will look fantastic on the wall in case I ever slip through a wormhole in space and time and land in an alternate reality where I'm a gallery artist!"), overthinking reference materials, and spending waaaay too much time rendering things that require very little rendering.

To that end, I've challenged myself to make some daily drawings whenever I get a few minutes free in my work schedule. The only rules:

• Each piece should be no larger than 5x7(ish), and


• Each piece must be finished within the space of a single day, or abandoned.

It gives me a chance to work on creating coherent compositions on the fly, as well as reinforcing the idea that "no deadline" doesn't necessarily mean "this should take forever."


The first batch of drawings turned into a series of perplexing and pointless quests carried out by a girl in impractical armwarmers. The one with the snail is my favorite.


I have, of course, entirely defeated the purpose of this exercise by starting to make a larger, more tediously rendered finished piece out of the second sketch, which I will be posting soon. Oh well.