In recent weeks I have been experimenting more with collage, to add to my mixed media work. I have been printing my own papers with textures on a geliplate, and this has created wonderful papers for me to collage. I feel it has created some freedom in my style and work. Here are 3 spreads from one of my own stories that I am developing to submit to a competition.

I have squeezed in some time for marketing too. I created a new 3d pop out mailer that I hope will catch the eye of an art director or 2, and bound to give them an earworm!

I am also currently taking some time to work on a couple of my own stories, editing the text and developing the characters and rough page ideas. I have been working on the picture book course and business course with The Good Ship Illustration and it has been so much fun, lots of idea prompts which has led to writing 4 new stories that I am working on. Here are a few sketchbook pages for a couple of the characters for one of those stories.

Tall Tale Tommy

Here is a little bit of an insight on how I work on a picture book. This is one of my own stories that I am working a few final illustrations on to send out to agents and publishers. Once I have the story edited I add notes to give me ideas on the images, I draw lots of character sheets, to fully develop each character for the story. This is then worked out to how each spread will look and I do a small very rough book dummy, (seen here but I’m not showing the full book, I don’t want to give the end away!) I try to vary the points of view, scale and whether they are full spreads or single pages, to add variety for the reader. I have then picked a couple of pages that I work up into full size roughs (sometimes scaled up if there is tiny detail.) Once I am happy with how it all works with text too I work up the final illustration.

Sometimes I get 2 strong images in my mind for one page or spread, so I end up working on them both to decide which I prefer, even then I find it hard to decide, the above 2 images are for the same section of the book, I still don’t know which I prefer.