Playing Outside With Imagination and Pride

Happy Saturday!

So, today I'm sharing with you a revisit of some ideas and themes I worked with last spring. My inspiration comes from my childhood memories of enjoying imaginative play-times outside. Currently I'm using those ideas and themes and reworking them into a collection of illustration + poetry spreads which will hopefully turn into a nice book sometime =)

"Little Lilac Ladies"

Ancient myths say mystic powers
Are given to some lilac flowers.
Those having five petals or more
Store magic wishes at their core.

This piece alludes to how my friends and I would comb through lilac bushes in search of 5 petaled flowers because supposedly they had wish granting powers!

 And some process steps:

Inked floral work

Painted floral work

Again, the finished piece

"Helping Hands"

When spring returns back to the land,
Little birds could use a hand
With making cozy, tidy nests
For themselves and for their guests.

This illustration reflects how in the spring my friends and I would build nests out of grass to help the birds out :)

(rhymes + illustrations are all by me)

Size: 11x17"
Media: Waterproof inks + watercolour + gouache + microns

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