New Piece

This is another new piece for my children's story, where the boy is fed up of the mundanity of his house. Although in some ways the lack of extreme motion further adds to the feeling you get from the image of silence, for future work with motion however i will work on creating more movement within the image.

Elsewhere i have been trying to work on new characters, stories, and more challenging expressions and scenarios, using the cheapness of amazon to build by kiddie book collection as one of the things which will help with this.

Any comments or suggestions would be greatly appreciated, hope everyone is okay!

chickens

Hey all,
I recently bought Martin Sailbury's book "Illustrating Children's Books" (which is highly recomended by the way). In one chapter about drawing animals, he suggests drawing chickens because of their interesting shapes and "stacatto movements". Coincidentally, my dad recently bought six chickens so I went out drawing them!



All the observational drawing was very good practice for transforming prepartory sketches into my finished drawings. I've already come up with a picture book story, which this is a concept drawing for:

Hello

I have been working on creating more powerful backgrounds, luckily this part of the story relied on creating a theatrical atmosphere so i have created this down-the-street decadent view featuring the boy looking up at the skies. I may mute the colours a little more and darken the sky so it looks more intense.

Any comments would be appreciated :)

Mandrill with colour

Just moving on with the char development, here is my first attempt at my mandrill character in colour - the picture doesnt really do it justice, but i think it will fit in nicely with my pastelly jungle backgrounds!

Altho i think its missing something - it doesnt seem as good as my toucan :o/

A Bit More

Yes i know i now need to move onto places and situations etc but i had to develop this character because its something ive never drawn before! So I had a quick sketch of a few typical facial expressions - its helped me get used to the character's face as previously i have only had photo reference of the animal so adapting it into a personality has been tricky!

Update so far =)

Ive been doing alot of sketchbook and colour work so far, working on different stories and again trying to build on my style and ideas. Most recently Ive been working on a range of greeting cards, i found my characters are quite heart warming and appealing hence i felt they would work in this area quite well. I'm liking this idea so far and have created a few different version of cards for different occasions. I m working on three different stories at the moment, building on a new version of my 'Emily' story and also looking at one which incorporates lots of animals and characters. As well as that Ive been doing alot of life drawing work to try and build on my drawing skills which helps me draw my characters in different positions doing things! Ive found this really useful so far, got quite a few ideas in the pipeline for 3d characters and a small character artist book, as well as doing more in depth research and analysis of my style and artists. Seem to be progressing well so far, just a few images of work so far . . . .

Illustration Cupboard

When i was in London last week i went into the Illustration Cupboard for a quick look round. The Kevin O'Neill exhibition was on of his comic and graphic novel work, which was interesting to see, but not really my style. What was great to see was some Shaun Tan originals which were left over from his exhibition, it was really interesting to see close up his colour work, in pastel and paint, as were usually used to seeing the vivid black and white images. His images were very soft and endearing, i really took quite a bit of inspiration from them. Also really liked the John Vernon Lord images from Alice in Wonderland, as I'm working on some book cover front jackets. And when looking through the signed books i found a great retelling of Beauty and the Beast, illustrated by Angela Barret, which again had amazing soft imagery. I luckily managed to but a signed Shaun Tan book 'tales from outer suburbia' and a signed Robert Ingpen book 'Peter Pan and Wendy'- very happy about these =)
Great trip, and Great inspiration!

Bit of an update.

One thing I've managed to complete, still trying to keep up my sketchbooks though and painting at least one thing everyday, at the moment I'm trying to evolve my characters and watercolours. This was done as a charity thing. Hope everyone is having a good summer despite the weather we've been having! x