fiery fred

I am closer to submitting the third 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, is a vignette of a young dragon who has yet to control his fiery breath.

The brief went something like this: Capture Fred's look of baffled horror as he sets fire to a thatched cottage roof. Audience is for fairly young children, but will also appeal to older children if enough humour is present. Use very bright colours, loose paint work, and thick black line work. Use portrait orientation and despite the chaos make it easy for a child to decode what is happening in the illustration.

​So the first step was a few practice sketches to work out what Fred should look like:

And a practice go at the composition of the image, especially the relationship between the dragon and the cottage:

Here is the pencil outline for the vignette:

And some of the initial washes, starting with our friend Fred: 

Some more washes along, and the vignette shape can be seen, and the background is taking shape:

Now to add in some more layers of colour and to intensify the fires poor Fred has lit:

The next thing is to add the thick soft pencil, while somehow keeping it both loose and bold:

The last step is doing some clean-up with Photoshop:

And Fiery Fred is done. Just like the first part of this unit, using this method of building up a picture is well outside my comfort zone. I'm far more comfortable using pen ink for the backbone of the image instead of watercolour.