My Secret Elephant

Sunbirds ~ colour test

I’m doing a happy dance – I have an extension on the book which means I can stop with the stress-induced book illustration nightmares. phew.

More details from the last page spread sketch, a little further along in the drawing process.

(pencil on tracing paper)

this is a detail of the other side of the spread I posted yesterday.

pencil on tracing paper sketch detail from the last spread of the book. still got a long way to go.

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My reference is from a bunch of photos I shot at the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens a few years ago.

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In addition to the swans, Kensington Gardens is also home to Peter Pan.

These are photos of my inspiration board that hangs above my desk. I put this together for this book project to remind me to focus on line, composition and pattern and to spur me on when I get overwhelmed and frustrated with what I’m working on. I didn’t consciously choose them for the colour scheme, it just worked out that my selections fall into the earthy colour palette I’m obviously partial to.

I’ve been given or have bought various art cards over the years; one of my favourites is the lovely dog drawing (Study of a lurcher by Jonathan Trowell), bought while on holiday in Totnes last summer.

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Spurge, Withyham, 1909 by Charles Rennie Mackintosh + map of London

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A lady and a young man by Isoda Koryusai, Late 18th A.D + $.42 Lunar New Year stamps

rough colour and medium tests

I had a few minutes the other day to play around with some ink and wood block stamps I bought Maiwa Supply a while ago. This isn’t the style I’ll be using for the book, but it gave me some good ideas for other things – and for the approach I’ll take when I’m ready to start adding colour to my book artwork.

I have two ideas that really don’t seem to want to exist in the same composition. I’m getting lost in the drawing at full size, so it’s back to thumbnails.

Some of the spreads having been giving me particular difficulties. When layers of tracing paper fail me, I’ll scan the sketches and drop them into Photoshop so I can chop things up, move them around, drop in rough colour and draw loosely over the top of everything until I find a solution.

On another note – reindeer have the most fantastic antlers – they’re incredibly curvy, curly, asymmetrical and shoot off in unexpected directions. This was originally going to be a troika, but I’ve already got one horse on an early page and a reindeer drawn sleigh fit the calm mood better than a sleigh drawn by a trio of charging horses. Plus the reindeer antlers were way too cool to pass up and that decided it for me.