I went right back to my initial vision and simplified it, having decided that I could use a big, wide landscape on the title page that would provide the setting for the majority of the book right from the start. Also, there might not be a suitable double page to get it all in later on. Two birds with one stone.
I am much happier with this now, and can get on with the cover design now – see the next post!
By now you will know that I’m creating a space adventure trilogy for 8-12 year olds.
The action takes place at the International Space School, which I have set in a green and mountainous area of Wales – one of the countries that makes up the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
I’ll need an illustration of the school for the book but I also need it for myself to really get a feel for the place. It is a fantasy landscape, but based on experience – places I’ve been and lived in.
They say that abstract, concept art is finished when it most closely resembles the idea the artist first had. So it is with illustrating a scene from a story you have written yourself.
Towards the end of the painting, I realised I’d become a bit obsessed with certain aspects of the drawing and had not really got the whole thing to come together. I made the smaller buildings quite eco – with sedum/turf roofs, but that makes it look too 20th century.
I think it needs to be more contemporary, so I need to go back and do more research. You don’t know these things unless you do them! I’ll come back with another version when I’ve done it and am happy.
This is probably the biggest illustration in the book and needs to be got right. I think it needs to go twice as wide – a big wide landscape – so it fits across the bottom of a page – maybe even across the preliminary pages – in fact hold that thought!
In this video I show how I have created two characters – hero and heroine – of my space-based, middle-grade adventure trilogy – GENERATION MOON – aimed at 8-12 year-olds and up.
Creating a character takes time. They are like new friends – you may think you know them, but it takes a while to really get to know them and understand their individuality and what makes them tick.
If you are going to create a whole book, populated with images of the characters, drawn from different angles and with different emotions, you need to practice, until it becomes second nature how to draw them.
It also helps to create some kind of a grid that you can refer to as the base plan for the character that you can return to when you get in a muddle or when you need to work out how to draw them in a new and tricky situation or angle.
In this video I take you inside my workbook and show how I draw the characters now and the whole series of sketches and thought processes that led up the the present versions.
00:00:00 Start – Drawing Glenn 00:02:37 Drawing Chao-Xing 00:05:17 Look through all the sketches in the workbook 00:14:52 Draw Glenn 00:16:53 Draw Glenn Again
