MATS2 WEEK 3 CHILDRENS BOOKS

Another week of MATS completed. Time is just flying by! This week was all about Children's Book Publishing. I felt quite comfortable this week but did not get a chance to really put the time into it that I would have liked.

In the end I was quite happy with my final piece. It's not my usual technique but it was fun to put together. 

As usual, Lilla eased us into the project with a "mini" assignment. We had to do some BIRD studies. I tried to start off with some realism, but I could not hold back the temptation to turn them into characters and personalities!!

When the assignment was revealed to us the text was a little more serious and 'grown up' than I was expecting and of course none of my sketches were appropriate. Lilla reminded us all to approach it in our own way, and to show case our own unique styles, so I tried to bring some humour into it!

I tend to get REALLY rough with my concept roughs, but I had quite a few ideas floating around. 

In the end I realised that I love to try to get a giggle from people with my illustrations, and felt that the birds nesting in the hat was probably going to get that reaction.

 

I really enjoyed creating the hand done look last week, so this week I used oil pastels, pencils and markers to create some interest. We were also encouraged to experiment with some hand lettering.

Once I started to colour things up I realised that the hat was a bit too high and created too much space around the sides (which I had intended to fill up with background scenery) but it was taking the focus off the humour a bit.

So I changed hat styles and made the main character much bigger. 

This meant no room for any other background detail, but I really wanted to the focus to be the hat. We are learning to EDIT our work and to realise that we don't need to cram everything into one piece. Maybe our other sketches and ideas will find a home somewhere else.

I also felt the baby birds scattered across the top of the hat were getting a bit lost, so I bunched them up a bit more and moved them away from the black bird to give them more focus.

Last of all - the text. I was a bit nervous about this, so I left it to the end, but was really happy with it when it all came together. I felt like it suited the style of the illustration.

So that's it for week 3. 

Week 4 is all about wall art. This was the week I was most worried about as I had seen from previous participants in this course that it's more abstract and hand created artwork - not really my thing. Our mini assignment is to collect some things for collage artwork. I will cover this in more detail at the end of the week. Wish me luck!