Shoo Rayner

Had to post this wonderful reply from one of the artists I contacted as part of my artists research:

 

He also has an amazing channel on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/user/ShooRaynerDrawing/videos

which is well worth subscribing to, lots and lots of useful information on there and such a nice guy!

I had many many other fabulous replies all with a wealth of information that will help me immensely so if you are ever in doubt about contacting other illustrators try it, the information you get back is fabulous and you get to speak to so many nice people and gain lots of different perspectives on being an illustrator.

 

Things I learned

Firstly, I love doing this kind of illustration.  I have come accross many different authors and respective illustrators that I love and gained a genuine interest in children’s book illustration.

It has made me think more about combining writing (which I love)  and poems (which I also write) with my own illustrations.

It has forced me to consider the audience and what typefaces they are more able to read.  What kind of illustrations would make the books attractive and fun for them and how the books can further their learning.

I will continue to research into this area and do some research on publishers and try making some small zines/story books.

I really enjoyed this project!!!

 

Last Image

Was to be of Peg being swung into the Peg Bag by her friends to try and find Meg.

and my final job was to put everything together in the correct format to submit for the competition.  The deadline isn’t until 1st June so I will post that one here soon.

The final submission will be two pages with the narrative, three illustrations and a hand drawn border.

I also experimented with various fonts for the title but eventually settled on my own hand drawn typeface as I wanted it to look like a washing line:

The one on the left is the one I will use.

 

Peg Party

For the next image I was going to be illustrating the ‘Line-dancing Competition’ so i needed to do an image with lots of pegs.  I took some reference images from my garde from different angles to give me some idea of the best one to use.

This is the first illustration I did using the same method as the image for Meg and Peg.

Again I did some further alterations as I felt that because it was a competition and kind of a party it might be good if the pegs were wearing party hats and there was some sort of banner so I had to draw these separately:

I then added these into the image:

 

 

HND Show

Some of the great exhibits done by my former college friends who are now on the HND at Sutton.  This was from their latest show held at the Jubilee Works in Digbeth.  Great to see them all again.

First Image

I have chosen to base the first image on the start of the story where Peg (The main character) is remembering when her sister was still with her and how they used to swing in the wind.

My first sketch:

I then tried colouring this in Photoshop:

but I think this looks too ‘flat’ and is just not my style of illustration.  It looks far too manufactured for my liking.  I then tried colouring the image by hand with plain old felt tips.

This looks to child like and patchy so again didn’t work.  I even tried running this through Photoshop and re-editing but could not get any satisfactory results.

Finally, I found the best method was to hand draw the whole image again and then colour it with felt tip pens.  Suprisingly I found that felt tips that were running out were best as I could get a rougher textured finish that I liked.  I then ran this image through photoshop and did some edits and came out with a version the I was happy with.

Had

Had to edit this one again later, as I realised that I had forgotten to add the springs on the pegs!! Always worth double checking everything.

 

New Characters

From my research into different kinds of pegs I then did some further illustrations designing new characters which are as follows:

I am much happier with these and they are much more identifiable and have much more expression and inidividuality.

These were drawn on my Wacom Tablet and then coloured.

 

Funky Pegs

“I love our little on-line chats!”

‘I appreciate the calmness it would bring, I just have trouble letting go..’

General concensus on my initial peg illustrations was that they were to similar and maybe it would be better to have different kinds of peg so that it would be easier to distinguish the different characters.  these were images I found online of different colours, styles and sizes of peg.  Pegs made of different materials and decorated and dressed up pegs.

 

Michael Aaron Williams

Came across this artist’s work while searching for different media to use as I like to experiment with unusual media.

Website here: http://michaelaaronart.com/

I just LOVE his work and he unbelievably only uses coffee for these beautiful images.

Did try some pegs using coffee and a refillable brush pen but they didn’t come out very well.  I will definately try something on a bigger scale with proper brushes and different tones of coffee as i find this work lovely.

 

 

Silly Stories

This is a story that came to mind quite a long time ago and keeps running through my mind (this is why I think I may be a bit weird, but that’s good right?) when i am hanging out the washing.  I have been meaning to write this story for ages and just never got around to it but it fits perfectly with the Cheltenham Award.

I imagine that the pegs are alive and that the ones next to each other are married and sometimes they get divorced and some of them get injured when they fall off the line.  They get moved to another line or de-moted when they have been naughty etc etc.

I think this would be a fun story for children, had plenty of scope for illustrations, would be fun to do and I like writing so I would enjoy that too.

I did some initial drawings to see what I thought the characters might look like:

And began thinking of names for the pegs such as ‘Pinchy Pete, Gregory Peg, Two Piece Polly etc.