Before I move onto new images, I am going through to make amendments to the current ones, so that I am a bit happier with them. (Hence the playing around with purples).
I've begun to re-draw the "yellow drink" image, as the girl's face was pretty hideous...
And there were a number of problems with the drawing. Instead, I've used an old photo of my sister, flipped around, to create a more realistic image...
Although it is frowned upon to work from photos, I don't have a huge amount of contact with children to use as models, and I actually quite like my personal attachment to these photos of my and my sister's childhood - they hopefully add a sense of nostalgia and depth (at least, to me they do!)
One of the problems I have at the moment is that, going straight into the illustrating, I didn't think about the character's in the images. As I wanted an ambiguous, poetic feeling, I don't have an exact back story to the book, and so haven't created a central character, so the children (all girls) in the images are all quite different, which will probably cause further confusion for the reader. So, I've made the decision to try to use photos of my sister as much as possible throughout the book - to try to add to the continuity.
Anyway, I'm currently much more pleased with the re-drawing, which I think has more sensitivity to the scene...
I still need to add the colour (in this instance using pencil crayons), but I do like the simplicity of the pencil lines and simple tones of light through the paper. I have ideas to concentrate (after this first project) to create more adult illustrations with more muted tones, perhaps to illustrate poetry, going back to some of the first images I made such as this one:
