Illustrating

Had the second part of the book illustrating course I signed up for yesterday in Glen Lorne with Jacqui Taylor and Vanessa Hounsell. I have really enjoyed it and am inspired to have a go. Dug out my water colour brushes and paint today and am going to get going. There are possibly going to be artist retreats led by Jacqui in the future up in Chimanimani. I am very keen to go on one.

Here are some notes I made on illustrating for those interested. Take a read.
To start off you need to carefully look at the text you are going to illustrate. You can then start making thumbnail sketches and doodles. Carry a note pad with you.

The three C's are
1. Content of the book
2. Context - is it now or the future? Where? Who? What is it relating to?
Reference your work and look up images.
3. Continuity - characters should be the same in each illustration and in proportion. You should know the character so you can embellish the story.

When illustrating you should identify who you are targeting and the amount of text that is appropriate to your audience and ratio of text to pictures. If for children (especially those who cannot read yet), it should be as visual as possible so the child can tell the story from the pictures and you can add things to entertain the adults reading the story.

You should keep theme colours and develop a story board with your sketches, noting how you mixed the particular colours with which paints. This is again important for continuity. The characters should have features that continue too and you should explore your characters in developing your story board. Do lots of sketches of your characters. Use photographs and sketches from life.

Be careful about composition and perspective and think about your view point and what to include. Think about the different planes and bear in mind what makes your foreground, middle ground and back ground. Keep it simple with these three.

Start your drawings in a free style with lots of sketching. Use this as the foundation. Then develop cameos. Go from general to particular.

When drawing adults, their features are higher up their faces, whereas children have eyes and noses lower down.

Make sure you have a focal point. Everything in illustrations respond to everything else and need to link with other pictures in a logical progression. Facial expressions of characters are everything!