MAKING WAVES

Starting work on a picture book can be daunting. I’m quite happy scribbling away using a 3B,4B or 5B pencil doing endless rough drawings, but there comes a point when you have to start working in COLOUR! 

In my head it’s all in colour right from the start. I can see the book in full colour when I’m working on the roughs but making that leap towards a final piece of work, committing to one final version of an idea, that’s not always easy.

There are often spreads in a book that I know I’m going to find more challenging than others, as a rule I never start with a tall order, because if things don’t go to plan and you become bogged down in a spread right from the start it doesn’t do your confidence or your enthusiasm for the project any good at all. I prefer to work my way slowly towards any challenge that may be lurking in the book, building up confidence, finding my way from page to page until I feel ready for ANYTHING! 

For ‘Cyril The Lonely Cloud’ the first piece of artwork that I produced in colour was a spread depicting Cyril floating above some fishing trawlers out at sea. I picked this illustration as my starting point because I the idea of painting the sea, and all those lovely waves really appealed to me. I used watercolour inks to create a base colour for the spread and then layered up wave patterns using brush strokes to create a sense of movement. In the final version of the book this image was made into a single page, but despite the changes it was a good place to start!