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.

These are tight roughs that have been scanned. Some adjustments were made in photoshop (elements moved around, sizes of things adjusted). The printouts form the base for the final, tight drawings.

By pasting them up on the wall I can get an idea of how the book will flow. The upper right image belongs at the end of the one below it, but my wall is too short.

colour test with a rough sketch | pencil on vellum + digital