'Ratty's House'

'Ratty's House'
watercolour and gouache
24 x 31cm

This little 'The Wind in the Willows' illustration was completed Thursday - as hot of the drawing board as I can get. This is what Mole sees when he reaches the riverbank and claps eyes on Ratty for the first time.

I had lots of fun working on the trees, especially flicking masking fluid around to get the speckled bark effect. I was also quite pleased with the water.

Work in progress detail before whiskers and pinstripes.

The pencil rough

Sketches For A New Project

As with everything I'm doing at the moment I have hold back the finished artwork, however I have been given permission to show my sketches. Below you can see the beginnings of a map that will hopefully feature in a children's novel. I can't reveal the plot but suffice to say the main characters are not human!

 2nd Sketch

1st Sketch

You can see a few changes I had to make from the 1st to the 2nd sketch but essentially I kept the same view. The reason behind the 'google satellite' view is to show all the alleyways behind the terraced house clearly because the various back routes feature heavily in the story.