Work progresses.

New paint/collage work

The thing what I'm working on at the moment, when I'm not working on what I'm meant to be working on... heh.

It's based on a drawing I've had lying around for a little while, of some characters of my own, but my reason for working on it now is essentially to try out some of the collage ideas I've been thinking about lately. As I mentioned in my last post, I like how a couple of things I've done recently have had a bit of a stripped-back look compared to my usual approach.

Therefore I'm working on this quite slowly, having a big ol' think before I apply any more paper to stop myself from overworking it.

Also, my desk looks like this:

More A Little Princess

An updated version of this. In fact, apart from Becky's hair (she's the girl higher on the page) I haven't done any more work to the original, but I've played around in Photoshop to test ideas.

I really like the physical copy of this, but I can't get it to look good on screen - and that's something I've been thinking about lately: producing work that can be more successfully reproduced digitally. My two favourite recent bits of work are the character design for the father from Beauty And The Beast and my other A Little Princess illustration.

So perhaps the way forward is a slightly less texture/more watercolour-y approach with the acrylics, and using paper as flat pattern more than textured collage.

Anyway, I again did a quick mock-up of how this might look as a book cover and I think the result is not bad:

Beauty

I don't know if it's because I'm using an aging Emac since my own laptop died, because my scanner is getting on, or because my work is difficult to photograph/scan (the latter is definitely a factor) but these images a re extremely not good. At least they give the general idea.

Anyway. As I already mentioned, striking the right balance in telling Beauty And The Beast to young children is a challenge. With Beauty, you want to make her look young so a young readership has sympathy with her, but at the same time you don't want to depict someone who looks like a pre-teen falling in love with a big, bestial male.

My thoughts, as usual, gravitated towards 20s/30s design - in this case the boyish, shapeless cuts of the dresses. Putting Beauty in a shapeless, dropped-waist shift means she still looks cute but her age is ambiguous. I also gave her beauty of the soft-20s-prettiness variety which again makes her look ambiguously youthful I hope. Her hair is in loose pigtails rather than being down or formally dressed.

I also think it makes sense to dress Beauty in practical, slightly boyish clothes (I imagine this is some sort of riding outfit) rather than the beautiful gowns she is normally shown in, and to put her hair in a careless, scruffy style, because it throws any prettiness I've managed to depict in her face into sharp relief.

The lines might be very 20s but I again tried to inject a certain amount of vagueness about time and geographical setting by the patterns I chose. I gave Beauty a white palette since she's the traditional fairy tale innocent. It also makes her black hair look more striking.

I'm well into using colour as a signifier... in this case I like how she and the Beast are at opposite ends of the greyscale so they're related in colour as well as contrasting. Her white is punctuated with earthy colours, green and brown (probably not clear in the scan), because she's your humble, friend-to-all-living-creatures type. Beast has bright red and blue in his clothes because he is removed from down-to-earth living as a prince and a Beast. The palace is dominated by my favourite colour, green, which can be used to create an unworldly, unnatural atmosphere as I've attempted in the dining-hall illustration. Alphonso Cuaron uses green an awful lot to create various atmospheres. Look at his 'A Little Princess' - it's the greenest film you'll ever see.

If I was working on the actual picture book, some sort of colour/lighting map is one of the first plans I'd make.

Designing the Beast

So, the process of coming up with a character design for the Beast.

I love sketching in the V&A in South Ken, and it occurred to me when I was there the Natural History Museum next door might be a good place to get inspiration for a beast. The sketches in the top left

corner are some that I did there (when I wasn't jabbing small children with a sharpened pencil for getting in the way. Not really. I just wanted to. Bloomin cheek they've got, running round enjoying a child-friendly museum).

Ahem. As you can see, the animals I sketched don't have an awful lot in common with the gorilla/bear hybrid I ended up doing, but I find it often works this way - an important part of the process is trying an eliminating blind alleys. It's something I have to discipline myself to go through, this process, rather than just diving in and coming up against problems that should

have been eliminated at an early stage, when its too late to do much about it. In this case I'm glad I worked through civet- and dog- based ideas early on (see the early sketches in the top right hand corner).

After that I hit on something pretty close to the final design pretty quickly. I think this is because I was utilising a lot of the work I've done over years in drawing another character - Iorek Byrnison from Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials (relevant bit's about halfway through post). To me, the word Beast conjures a very mammalian creature, and if you want your Beast to be at all appealing, fur helps. But I didn't want the Beast to look too friendly, and I think this is why I started thinking along the same lines as Iorek Byrnison: reducing the proportional size of the head and eyes to make the character a little inaccesable and hard to read; more imposing.

The other consideration with Beauty And The Beast is while the Beast is just that, you have to try and make him not appear so animal that it seems weird that human Beauty falls in love with him.

Can I just take this opportunity, by the way, to point out what an odd fairy tale Beauty And The Beast is? Whereas tales like Cinderella and so on seem to have a fairly clear morality and absolutely archetypal plots, Beauty And The Beast seems to me to be something more rich and complex.

Anyway; bears and apes/monkeys struck me as the animals with the most obvious human-like physicality. I'd already thought about Iorek-style-beariness for the Beast's body and I liked the idea of contrasting that imposing bulk with quite a delicate, clever almost-human face based on a monkey's.

I think the final design looks a little like some depictions of the Chinese Monkey King. He's somewhere between a bear, a silverback gorilla, a monkey and a sloth. Putting trousers and boots on him pulls him a little more towards the human end of the scale.

So that's about it. All in all a design I'm pretty pleased with.

Beauty And The Beast

This is the double-page spread done as part of the competition entry. All of these images combine collage and paint. This one is 44x28cm. I want to talk a bit more about the process but keep not having time... I think I'll scan some of the sketches and stuff to show my thoughts on the brief.

... the father...

Here's Beauty's father. Bad scan again. But probably my favourite of the three characters designs.

He's based, oddly, on Thomas Hardy. I was leafing through a book of early 20th century photography and that look leaped out at me - I was trying to make everything slightly anachronistic, combining elements from different eras and places so the overall look was quite timeless. So the idea of very Victorian/Edwardian facial hair on someone in quite medieval clothes appealed to me.

Beast

I'm entering this Waterstone's illustration competition to commission a previously unpublished illustrator. The brief is for a new version of Beauty And The Beast, being written by the great Michael Morpurgo. And here is my Beast (bad scan)...

I'll post at some point in a bit more detail re. the design process etc.

A Little Princess again

Unsure of how to proceed with the previous A Little Princess illustration, I did a different one... actually a lot of the painting was done ages ago, like 2009 or something, and then abandoned. But I happened across it in a folder and thought I could tie it in with the more recently started ALP illustration by including some found patterned paper (Sara Crewe's dress and the sleeve of Becky's).

I'm pretty pleased with the result. Here's an approximation of how it might work as a wrap-around book cover:



Course it's not remotely what I'm meant to be getting on with, but I'll, er, put it down to practice...

EDIT: someone pointed out I'd forgotten this: the picture is based on a screenshot from the 1995 film version of A Little Princess. The characters are changed to a different interpretation, but their positions and the context is closely based on the screenshot.

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?