Yesterday, I showed you how I’d been reading the winning stories from the Welsh Books Council Dahlightful schools writing competition and how I decided how I was going to illustrate each story.

Today, in part 2, I’ll show you how I go from a rough sketch to a piece of finished artwork.

This Story, by Catrin Watson-Jones, of Aberconwy High School, tells the story of Nai, who falls into a virtual reality game where he meets Gareki an Ai character who wants to be a real person.

The two team up against Segatendo, who is making the game impossible for them. If they win, Gareki will become a real person and Nai will have a real friend. I felt that we needed to see Nai wearing his Oculus Rift headset, being zapped by Segatendo, so I did some research on on the headset and based the illustration on a sketch I’d previously drawn in PC World, while watching a kid dancing about in the Vive demonstration area!

Segatendo is described as a 3 foot tall sprite, with fairy wings and a pair of blue shorts and red shirt. A large gold crown was placed on his messy blonde hair. There’s not much description of the other two, so I decided to make Nai look a little shy and Gareki I felt should look like the cool guy Nai would really like to be friends with.

In this video I show how I go from sketches to finished sketch to final artwork – oops! There was something I didn’t like about it, so I started again!