good idea katie!

Katie's things! (Not Tristram's)

Above are some images I've been working on for my new story.

Its about hairy Harry and how he finds a monster in his wardrobe.

Its explained in a fairly brief page by page description in the video.

I did these in the opposite order than they appear.

Thanks!

Katie

I don't know why all of this is underlined, or how to stop it.

Here is a snippet of the mine scene!

Cartoonimation

Hi All, Here is a catch up of what i have been up to in the last week.

Basically it's an awful lot of drawing, water colouring and scanning.. There are lots of props and scenery pieces to create too, but i am happy with the consistency of it all.

badabing on a wacom!

finished page (pop up still needs doing) just tried adding some handwritten text. I like the text centred at the top as it makes an impact but the text at the side will probably need to be smaller when its printed. And my handwritings a bit messy! OH and rubbish photo, need to use uni a3 scanner.

Oliver Jeffers at Offset Festival

A video of my processsess

Today i made my end papers - and filmed the process! It was very fun to make :) I did print the green paper as well so might add that in at a later date.

Stop-frame animation of making picture book illustration from Jasmine Hortop on Vimeo.

Kevin Waldron

Amazing picture book artist and author of 

Mr Peek and the Misunderstanding at the Zoo

http://www.kevinwaldron.co.uk/

pop UP!

RIGHT its been a tricky start, and what may seem simple may actually be extremely fiddly - but ive started my pop-up experimentation. I began just in white and have only recently moved on to colour, this was to concentrate purely on the shape and cut of the pop-ups, and to see what could be achieved through the simplicity of light and shadow. When moving on to colour I have kept it blocked - one baby step at a time! - but tried to introduce some of my own style through the colour and textures.

Some practice folds -

when working in white I've been looking at the work of David Pelham and his book 'Trail' as well as the series white picture books by Robert Sabuda. All pop-up books are first built in a similar way to a dummy book called a white dummy,  working from a rough design and then building a white dummy concentrating first on the engineering of the pop-ups and then illustrating after. 

In this book Pelham uses the cut of the paper, the engineering, and how it transpires with the light all to his advantage. Although it may look very complicated its all based on a series of simple folds (but gets very complicated when its all put together!) . It was really good to look at when beginning the project as I want to really feel comfortable with the engineering before I start incoroprating illustrations into them as well, but hopefully thats not far off :) I'm having fun introducing colour at the moment! 

Velociraptor development for picture book

  I have chosen to focus on dinosaurs and move away from dragons. I will be producing illustrations for an information/category book on dinosaurs and I have decided to start with a species called velociraptor, made famous by the Jurassic park films. There are more drawings to come including some drawings of raptors in interesting positions and angles. The drawings so far I am happy with although they have all come out as darker images. This could be because I am using a mechanical pencil that I only have one shade for. The images are fairly consistent with each other but i feel detail is lost because of this.

Rough plan of things I could include

Drawn from the jurassic park film. 

Fossil of foot print

Fossil of tooth

Raptor killing claw

Raptor egg fully developed

more detailed head of previous drawing

Velociraptor skull

my very first digital painting on photoshop

I will also be drawing diagrams of how the raptors kill their prey and also a diagram of their scale. These are just some drawings so far. I will need to think about the text to accompany the drawings and also layout for the book for example double page spreads. I will continue to draw and hopefully improve the quality as i progress.

nature centre!

just thought id let everyone know incase anyone didnt.. for some animal reference drawing practice i advise everyone to go to the nature centre on pershore road! theres loads of animals and its only £3 for students... giant tortoises, a lynx, monkeys, porquepines, a red panda, loads of cool birds, lemurs, meerkats, as well as goats, bunnies and emus?! i only live about 4 minutes walk so have invested in a year season ticket for £30 so i can go hang with the animals all the tiiiime.

Dragon Concepts And Inspiration.

Have been drawing reptiles as they have given me more inspiration towards the dragon picture book.

Looking in particular at eyes and skin/skin patterns. May now use this more realistic look and apply it to my dragon for the picture book. Once I have applied it I will start focusing on whats going on around the dragon, like the scenery and other things. I'm not happy with the style at the moment of the dragon scene i illustrated previously. If i want it to look realistic I need to refine my drawing but this will be hard work. 

                                                                Dragon Concepts

    These are my original sketches from before. It was here I was deciding wether to go more realistic or do my own take on the dragons skin and going for more of a simple pattern that iv'e used in previous work. so i'm just showing were I am at the moment, trying to get more realism into my drawings. i think this is one of the main things I have realised from doing this project and also the fact that i need to be drawing the bigger picture and not just focusing on one thing. I will be putting the drawings up of the scenes soon with a more realistic take on them. Any comments or advise on what i'm doing would help thanks.

Beauty and the beast

Scene with Belle approaching castle.

Dragon with background

I have attempted a background, trying to get the balance right so it doesn't all merge together. but may try 

using pencil as well as just pen and try to get some grey tones in there. but i will photocopy and experiment. any feed back would be grand. for the next pieces i will include more characters interacting in a scene and see how that goes but this one is just the dragon and his castle.

This is it more detailed i may photocopy it and see what the trees look like black then the dragon

may stand out more. image is also slightly slanted because i had to take a photo, need an a3 scanner still looking at the moment. 

Initial ideas...

Initial ideas....

After researching into the story and the author i decided i wanted to go with making the characters more modern, putting them in more recogniseable clothes etc.

The Enchantress: disguised as homeless woman...


Beauty:

Pre-Beast:
Im still experimenting with characters, these are the best out of a bunch so far. Probably focus on the Beast for a while and other main characters... any feedback/advice would be appreciated :)

some inspiration

 Good to see a few sketches already posted up, I thought you could look at the following website, for a variety of visual styles, but especially in the way these illustrators sketch out ideas :)

http://twisted-genius.squarespace.com/

and especially:
http://twisted-genius.squarespace.com/journal/category/motivation-monday

Character drawing for Belle

Decided to go for the traditional feel towards the story, Keeping a 1700's look.
Now im going to try to arrange the character into scenarios aswell as working on the other characters.

Characters so far.

Not as much done as I'd hoped, found it hard to get into the project, but here's what I've got at the moment.

I've decided to go with having the Beast as a more humanoid animal rather than a mythical beast.

This drawing of the Prince was meant to be a starting point to give an idea of his appearance, I'm working on drawing more versions of him since this is quite flat but I won't be able to post them until I'm back in a week.

Haven't got many angles since I haven't got round to putting the characters more in situation, more colour will be added eventually. I've also got ideas for another few characters if they're needed in my development - but these four are my favourites to work on further at the minute.

Initial Beast Character drawings

Looking at using a dragon as the beast, working on some other drawings with the dragon illustrated in a scene with beauty and also more 3d looking drawings, these are the first drawings any advice would be appreciated.

Beauty and The Beast.

I've been reading the requirements for the entries, and I'm a bit stumped because it asks for two of the characters to be animals and one human, unless the fairytale has no animals in it - which depends on the version of Beauty and the Beast that's being retold as some of them don't have any important animal characters (apart from the Beast obviously).

Does anyone know which version we're illustrating? Or have any suggestions of how this can be solved?

Eric Carle

Obviously we all know who Eric Carle is but did you all know he has a blog?! It's got some really interesting bits and pieces- I especially liked this post about the rejects he makes, the things that didn't make it into books: http://ericcarleblog.blogspot.com/2011/03/rejects.html

Enjoy! x

Cheltenham awards extended!

Ayup folks! So today was a nice day of finishing off the Cheltenham awards piece and then I found out, the deadline has now BEEN EXTENDED UNTIL 23RD!

Kind of dismayed to find I've been working my ass off and didn't need to put quite as much pressure on myself, but now I might well go back and explore some other ideas...maybe even submit two pieces DAYUM!

Just thought I'd share in case anyone was starting to panic!

http://www.cheltenham-illustration-awards.com/

xx

Different fonts

A couple of different fonts for my Rabbit story, I'm thinking of using the top one which is the same font as my Birds book.