Catching Up

Happy New Year! I was a lucky girl this Christmas and got a scanner, so now I have no excuses for keeping up with posting my progress in illustration. In the fall I took a wonderful class on illustrating children's books, below are some of the projects that I completed throughout the semester.

The first task was to develop a character - mine was a helful, shy 5 year old who liked dinosaurs...

Here were some of my preliminary sketches:


followed by a pen&ink:

And then the final:
Here was another version of a helpful guy, based on an experience I had with my 5 year old this summer at our cottage:


Another project was to anthropomorphize an object. Here's my exhausted coffee mug...


Finally, we developed a storyboard for "Little Red Riding Hood" and then focused on one scene to develop...



At this point I did a color sketch in watercolor to get an idea of how I wanted to complete the final

And here's the final on Arches Watercolor paper (my favorite parts of this image are the deer on the left side, and the owl). One of the things I love most when I read a children's book, is the times where the reader knows something the main character does not. I don't think I was successful in making it obvious enough, but in this image RR thinks the animals want to play with her - the text clarifies that, but really, what I tried to do was portray the fear in the animals and their desire to warn RR of the danger ahead.