Finished Illustration For A Children's Book...

To follow up my previous post (click here), I can now show you the finished illustration.

I ending up working with ultramarine watercolour as an under-painting which can work fantastically well when you glaze colours on top, especially if you want a cool 'night time' atmosphere. So lots of thin glazes later I was finally able to build up the darker colours in the tree and the grass. I've found by building up the same colour wet-in-wet in clumps I can give a convincing impression of grass tufts.

For the finishing touches I used gouache, particularly on the fur highlights and the odd blade of grass.

Illustration For A Children's Book...

Previously I have posted a map for a children's book and now I can show you the beginnings of an interior colour illustration for the same book.

Above you can see the two roughs I produced to flesh out my favourite thumbnail sketch. On the top is a line drawing designed to show where it character appears in the composition, beneath that is a smaller sketch that outlines the basic values in the composition.

I quickly came to realise that a simple 3 value structure would apply to this painting - dark foreground, mid-tone middle-ground and light background. Dan dos Santos has done a fantastic post about this compositional technique on Muddy Colors.

So here we have a more detail sketch which shows the value structure I was after. As you can see the car has done a disappearing act and the main characters have been enlarged and their poses tweaked.

Hopefully in the next week I will get permission to show you the finished illustration.