Thursday 6 February 2014

How to Illustrate a Picture Book: Creating Different Animal Characters


Yes, John has been editing like a demon and we have now finished the 2nd of our two new films about creating a set of roughs. This one tells you how I designed some of the many animal characters for Jungle Grumble. If you are new to my blog, Jungle Grumble is the latest book I have been working on with author Julia Jarman


In this 2nd film, I show you how I begin with photographic reference and how I play around with facial features in particular, to turn each animal into a character more suitable for a picture book:



We shot the footage for this film back in September, at the same time as the one I published last week. I had just finished all the line-drawings and had submitted them to the publisher, so it seemed a good idea to talk about the process while everything was fresh in my memory. 

But both films got put on a back-burner for a while, because of school visits and festivals. Then suddenly I had my artwork deadline to meet. We finally got round to editing them a couple of weeks back, while I was still having to sit around, because of my bad foot

Anyway, I really hope you like our efforts. We have over 1000 views on the first film, which is great:



Please, please, please - if you enjoy the films, do share the links and tell your friends!

The next film to be uploaded to my YouTube channel will be another demonstration with pastels at my drawing board, showing you how I turn one of my roughs into a piece of finished artwork. Let's hope we get that one edited together a little more swiftly for you!


7 comments:

Louise Forshaw said...

Love your sketches Lynne! So neat!

penandpaints said...

Hi Lynne,
Thank you for doing these videos. I'm always drawing doodles to go with my books and it's brilliant to see how a professional does it :)

Art Matters said...

Excellent videos, Lynne -well done to both of you. These give such a good idea of all the hard work that goes into illustration. Thank you.

Lynne the Pencil said...

Thanks folks - glad you enjoyed them :-)

Sofia said...

You are wonderful!

marita said...

amo tus post! me encantannn!!! mi ingles va progresando cada día =)
besos!

Elli Maanpää said...

Thank you Lynne for sharing these videos! Very interesting to see how the process goes on. Love to see the third one with the pastels. Have a happy weekend!
regards,
Elli