Illustration Portfolio
“Giant!!!” cried the Queen
This year’s Illustration Challenge was “Fairytale Mash-Up”. I chose to turn the tables on Jack and the Beanstalk by having the Wizard of Oz’s Queen of the Field Mice capture him and his golden harp Gulliver’s Travel-style near the poppy fields not far from Jack’s cottage.
After getting an approved sketch for Lost, I began sketching concepts for two new word prompts, “Time” and “Flight”. I haven’t gotten the go ahead on any of these yet… still working on it. EB wants the image to stand on its own, be instantly readable as “Time” or “Flight”… not needing any explanation of what is going on. I do think that my thumbnails as drawings are getting better though, and one of the thumbnails has given me a story idea I’m pretty excited about.
In July, I was awarded a mentorship through NESCBWI with illustrator EB Lewis. His first assignment for me was to illustrate the word “Lost”. In addition to capturing the word, EB wanted to see narrative, emotion, and anticipation. Developing the concept was the most difficult part of the project. I drew dozens of sketches until EB told me to move forward on a sketch of a lost girl meeting a tiger.
From there, I collected reference and drew a final drawing. EB liked the drawing but wanted to see more of the setting and to see the emotion expressed in ways beyond facial expression.
My revised sketch was well received and developed into a final painting.
A LOT of sketches came before I arrived at the girl with the tiger idea that EB told me to develop further. Having the narrative capture the essence of the word “lost”, avoiding cliches, conveying a sense of emotion and creating anticipation were all a part of the challenge. While I liked some of the story ideas that grew out of these exercises, most of them did not satisfy all the challenge’s requirements.
February means signing up for the annual NESCBWI spring conference. It’s a little like signing up for concert tickets! This year, there is a 4 hour Intensive workshop with Giuseppe Castellano, Executive Art Director with Penguin Random House. An assignment was given to illustrate a character from Beatrix Potter’s stories. 2016 marked the 150th birthday of Beatrix Potter and a collection of illustrations by contemporary illustrators was compiled in A Celebration of Beatrix Potter. I choose to depict the frog, Jeremy Fisher, in a scene from one of her stories in which he in out fishing and is overwhelmed by a much bigger fish than anticipated. I sketched out two versions and ultimately selected the drawing on the right. I felt it had a little more suspense and captured some of Jeremy’s superior nonchalance.
