cow and bird

I am still on the down hill run 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 second part is a bigger project, which this time had to be bigger than A4 but no bigger than 40cm x 33cm, and landscape in orientation. 

The brief went something like this:

Illustrate a single page spread from a gentle story about a cow who finally finds friendship with a bird. The story reveals what they learn and see of the world around them as they travel. Allow 1/4 of the page as a text area, and a bleed all round. The image has to be appealing, yet delicate, and in soft colours. Good contrasts of scale between bird and cow were recommended. 

The following was my first concept drawing, but it got discarded because it was too similar to what other students have done.  

Then I did some roughs of the cow

And played around with ideas for the bird

And then did a concept drawing I was happier with. I wanted to show the cow and bird relating to each other co-operatively.

It was suggested to me that there would be more sense of travel if they were both facing the same direction. So I took that on board.

From here on in, it is photographs because the A3 scanner does not do delicate colours well at all. 

I went for a blue and white cow because I thought that black or dark would deaden the outcome, and blue and white are symbolic of milk if the average milk carton is anything to go by.  

The plan was to do light initial washes with watercolour, and then add texture and softness with coloured pencil.

This is where the watercolour washes end, and the coloured pencil work starts

All the changes get very subtle here 

Now for a good quality scan from our local office supplies store   

And then firstly to Photoshop for some clean-up of pencil marks and other things, and then to InDesign to add some original text.

Here's how it ended up after all of that. Firstly with crop marks etc

And then without crop marks

It is nice to have this one completed.