The illustration below is one a of a group going into a book called Tasty Tales which is part of the discovery readers range aimed at teenagers who are learning English.
I thought it would be interesting if I showed something of my process for an illustration like this.
It all started with a nice, fairly specific artwork brief and a proof of the text layout for each of the illustrations. I went back with a couple of rough pencil sketches to show different approaches for the illustration.
The design team and the author decided which option they would like to progress with and I produced a tighter pencil at 150% of the final dimensions.
After comments on the tightened pencil - I blocked in the rough colours I intended on using and started getting the forms defined... I tried to iron out anything that seemed obviously wrong at this point - and I also made the minor adjustments that had been asked for.
When I was happy I'd got the basics roughed in - I turned the whole document into blue-scale and printed it out.
I then did a quick bit of pencilling over the top of the blue - lightly picked out the things I did't want to miss or that I thought still needed a bit of defining - then I inked the sucker in.
I scanned my inks back in and used the channel mixer to remove ALL the blue - this left me with some inked lines that I could then re-composite with the original coloured version... I tidied up any stray bits and mucked around with some effects until I was happy!
Then I just cropped it down to the correct dimensions.
I hope that was interesting for the lovely people who follow my blog - and not just me wittering on about my bonkers approach to making pictures.
