A Little Princess

This is for the other great Frances Hodgson Burnett classic, A Little Princess. Covers for this one are often quite unimaginative, I've noticed. They usually show a simple portrait of Sara Crewe, and where she is shwn in her 'riches' stage as opposed to the 'rags' stage this seems a particulalrly redundant front cover. The book is already called 'A Little Princess'. Adding a picture of a princess-looking little girl doesn't add a lot to the idea.

I wanted to focus on elements that might bee more intruiging to modern children than a richly-dressed girl passively standing there. So this is Sara engrossed in story-telling while lying on a decorative rug. I found a pattern (from my vast collection of pretty papers :)) that looked quite Indian, and positioned Sara's head in the middle of a crown-like part of the pattern...

It's not finished because I've paused, undecided as to whether I've overworked Sara's face in acrylic. Would it be better if I'd left it just as a layer of tissue, like the rest of her, with her features done in pen-and-ink?

Messing around with bits of paper (as is my wont) and paint, experimenting with bringing together a lot of the stuff I do. Particularly for use in illustration/book design. So here's the first experiement, a book-cover-style illustration for The Secret Garden. I put down a base layer of very washy paint; put in the mid-ground with loose tissue-collage and then build the foreground up with a combination of more careful tissue collage and paint, with a little touch of patterned paper for Mary Lennox's crown of flowers.