Sophisticated Play Time

I've often said that I'd like to illustrate children's books and recently I've sort of had a trial go at creating art for a whole children's story. This was for one of my illustration classes. However, we didn't create dozens of finished pieces, rather we went through the stages of character development, story-boarding, making a dummy book, and only producing about 2 finished illustrations (or one spread). Lot's of work, I'll tell you and I'm not going to share all of my process because that's just too many pages to deal with. I'll just post process stages for my two finished illustrations. (Or as always, I hope they're finished.)

First, there were the character sketches, which {this post} was all about actually.

Then, it was time to storyboard. And here's the snippet from it of the two illustrations I coloured:

After my story-board was approved, came the time to make the dummy book, which is a rough mock up of what the compositions the illustrator is imagining for the story. The pictures are often loose but understandable sketches.

As you can see, not that different from my little thumbnail, but I've made sure to leave space for text and rendered the characters in more detail.

And here's the line-work stage for page four (left page). I was in too much of a blunder to spend time scanning the line-work for page 5.

And then the finished pieces: And look - I actually painted a background. A light one, but I haven't done any backgrounds in my latest works so in case anyone thought I forgot how to -- I didn't!

Tea party time!

I made sure to leave plenty of room for text

Hopefully I didn't do a terrible job=)

Media: Microns, watercolors, colored inks + gouache