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.

Moustache cat

Not at all related to anything, but heres a cat with a moustache...relaxing.

new story!

Ive taken your advice chiu and decided to do a smaller side project to keep myself from getting too bogged down with the owl and the pussycat. As I've used a found story for my other book, I decided to try my hand at writing my own story this time. I quite like it! I'm not sure how many pages I will actually do to a finished state, or even how many pages it will be at this point! But here is the story..

Home, Sweet Home

Henry the hedghog was very lost. That morning he had left his mum to go sunbathe in his usual sunny spot, when suddenly he was picked up by something much bigger than him, and started travelling at much faster speeds than was normal for hedgehogs like Henry!

Henry rolled up into a little ball and hoped it would all be over soon.

But next…   THUD…   THUD THUD THUD THUD ….. BUMP!

At least that’s what he thought had happened..

‘Owwwww’ moaned Henry.

See, ever since that bump Henry couldn’t really remember … anything!

He couldn’t remember his way back home, and thinking about it, he couldn’t even remember what his home looked like!

Glumly he stumbled along wondering if he would ever see his brothers or sisters again, and after a couple of hours of hedgehog paced wandering, Henry hadn’t gotten any closer to finding them. He sat back and started to cry.

‘Oh what ever could be the matter?’ a big badger had come over – even bigger than whatever had picked him up that morning!

‘Well… I cant remember what my home looks like!’ he sniffed.

‘Oh dear..! How about you come see where I live, maybe it will ring some bells.’ Kindly said the badger, who led him down a hole, and down, and down, and down!

‘OH, I don’t think this is right. It’s much too dark, and way too big for me!’

Henry thanked the badger and carried on his journey.

Before long Henry got talking to a blackbird.

‘Maybe you live where I live! Come on, I’ll show you’ She took him in her claws up, and up, and up!

It was very spiky and..

‘OH I don’t think this is right. It’s much too high, I don’t like it at all!’

The blackbird gently put him back down on the ground, Henry thanked her and carried on his way.

Looking around him, Henry tried very hard to think of his home… He didn’t think it was high in a nest like the blackbird, but it seemed much too dark and underground in that burrow with the badger too.

‘You look lost’ said a caterpiller who had wriggled up beside Henry without him noticing ‘Can I help?’

Henry explained his bump, his memory loss, and how now he couldn’t find his way home. He felt himself begin to cry, but tried to be brave, and the caterpiller kindly offered to show Henry his home. Henry followed the caterpiller up and up the wobbly plant stalk, put one paw carefully on to the leaf ahead, then the other …..

THUMP!

‘OWW!'
' I think I’m a bit too big and heavy for where you live caterpiller! That can’t be right either’

Henry tried not to look too disappointed, thanked the caterpiller and stumbled on. It was beginning to get dark now, and it was Henry’s feeding time hours ago. He shuffled his way through the thick leaves , where suddenly it started to smell very familiar… He rummaged faster and faster until – ‘MUM!’

Henrys mum took him into a big hug  and cried ‘Oh Henry! Where have you been!? I was so worried.’

 ‘Oh mum I made so many friends! There was a really nice badger, and a..’

Suddenly Henry wasn’t so unhappy anymore, looking around his den at all his brothers and sisters, he snuggled into his mum’s arms and told them all of his adventure, with the big bump, the badger, the blackbird, and the caterpiller, and how he eventually found his way home, sweet home.

Any thoughts?