School Playground WIP

No painting today as I am preparing for my upcoming illustration workshop at Marlborough College Summer School. However here are a couple of photos of the painting so far.

The drawing has been transferred and cleaned up with a 2H pencil.

Here the sky and trees well on their way and I've just started to block in the school and playground.

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.