turtle and bird

I am on the down hill run now for submitting the fourth set of artworks for assessment to the London Art College's correspondence course D6 Illustrating Children's Books.

Of the set, the first part is a smaller project, which was an exercise in getting comfortable with drawing an animal in many different poses.

The brief went something like this:

​Take a real animal and do several drawings of that animal walking around. Then start experimenting with ways of moving that this animal normally can't do, eg dancing. Put one of these animals on an A4 page, keeping it lively and well placed and add a bird. The animals should complement each other somehow. Keep the background white except for a hint of cloud, grass etc. Use soft colours and experiment with texture, but make sure the elements cohere together.

​I started off looking at horses mainly, with a turtle thrown in.

As you can see, some fun was had in this experimental stage.

But I gave up on the horse, and became more serious about the turtle. The following sketches had inspiration from photographs of turtles I found online.

Then I played around with turtle ideas. 

This is the pencil outline I came up with, to begin building the final artwork.

When I photocopied it, and got the coloured pencils out to do a colour test - and to some extent a texture test, it got thumbs up from the family.

The plan I had was to do some light watercolour washes, and then add coloured pencil.

The paper buckled more than I thought it would, but I knew Photoshop could take care of that.

Here's how it looked with the watercolour before adding the coloured pencil work.

This image is about halfway through the coloured pencil work.

And this is as far as I went with the coloured pencils, before scanning it onto the computer to complete it.

And here's my turtle and bird, finished.

It is a long way from the horses I started with, but I'm happy with it.