Book Mock Up

For presentation it is always best to supply a book mock up to give a better idea of how the illustrations will look in-situ.  Blank book mock up psd’s can be found on-line usually for free that you can use for inserting your artwork.

Some of these can be found here:

https://www.mockupworld.co/all-mockups/

100 Best Free PSD Mockups

http://freebiesbug.com/psd-freebies/mockups/

http://www.freepik.com/free-photos-vectors/mockup

Below are the completed mock-ups for the book:

And as an extra a book mark was designed to help the children interact with the book and the story.

Refining the storyboard

12 illustrations in total were completed for the storyboard and these were as follows:

These were then added to a storyboard (blank templates can be found on-line) along with the relevant text.

Fairies

Part of the ‘Velveteen Rabbit’ writes about a flower fairy which was to be part of the illustrations and research was made in the first instance into how to draw fairies:

From here design of the ‘flower fairy’ character could begin:

The background and details were then added to form the final image:

 

Exploring Children’s Books

There are a multitude of children’s books available and if considering becoming a children’s book illustrator it is always worth checking out other illustrators work and finding styles that you find appealing.

this can be done on-line, at the local library of by simply buying some children’s books that you like the style of from charity shops or car boot sales.

These are some styles that have been found, some of which are popular illustrators such as Beatrix Potter and Quentin Blake but there are many that you can take inspiration from:

Credits: Several children’s books were investigated during this module in order to research layout and colour, styles of line, character detail and text layout such as Mister Magnolia by Quentin Blake (1980), Dragons Fire by Judith Nicholls (1990), The Tale of two Bad mice by Beatrix Potter (1904), Kippers Toybox by Mike Inkpen (1992) to name but a few.

Work in Progress

The ‘new’ rabbit character was then added into the illustration along with two ‘real’ rabbits to finalise the first image.

New Rabbit

Wasn’t happy with the rabbit character so this is the new character which is more ‘child-friendly and up colourful and should suit a children’s book much better and encourage the children to want to read it.

Based on this new design different variations were then completed to finalise the illustration style.

An on-line survey was completed to ask advice on which style was best.

 

Finalising Image One

These are the progress pictures for my first image, utilising the flower sketches I did outdoors and adding in the rabbit.  These were coloured using a Wacom Tablet (http://www.wacom.com/en-gb).

Below is the initial thumbnail sketch and below that the revision and start of the final image.

Testing different sizes for the rabbit, adding in the ‘real’ rabbits and trying out different print variations to get the best result.

Backgrounds

A love of flowers and sunshine inspired some outside sketching to use with the main illustration.  Below is the initial sketch and photographs taken during the drawing exercise.

Poses

These images were exloring how to draw the rabbit in various different poses, which is more difficult than it looks.  It is best to practice as much as possible and research the work of other illustrators.  There are some wonderful character design boards on Pinterest (https://uk.pinterest.com/) that can be used to gather information.

These were just initial sketches for the body poses to go with the various text that was being illustrated.  The head needs more work as there are a lot of dissimilarities that need correcting.

 

Random Finds

These are some illustrations completed by other students (Names unknown, please tag yourself if they are yours).  Just love the character design with these.