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.