Madeline in London - Tonal Exercise

In this exercise I chose a colour double spread from the picture book Madeline in London by Ludwig Bemelmans where I really liked the page layout and composition. Then I painted it in black and white to do this tonal study. 

Little Red Riding Hood - Brothers Grimm

The wolf thought to himself: 'What a tender young creature! what a nice plump mouthful - she will be better to eat than the old woman. I must act craftily, so as to catch both.'

So he walked for a short time by the side of Little Red Riding Hood, and then he said: 'See, Little Red Riding Hood, how pretty the flowers are about here - why do you not look round? I believe, too, that you do not hear how sweetly the little birds are singing; you walk gravely along as if you were going to school, while everything else out here in the wood is merry.'

Little Red Riding Hood raised her eyes, and when she saw the sunbeams dancing here and there through the trees, and pretty flowers growing everywhere, she thought: 'Suppose I take grandmother a fresh nosegay; that would please her too. It is so early in the day that I shall still get there in good time.'

3-D Character Study Built From Scratch

I made this little guy in an illustration class I’m taking with the super fun, talented, and accomplished illustrator and chidren’s book author Lisa Cinar. The idea is to build a 3-D character to help develop a 2-D character. With a physical character you can:

1) change the position of the arms, legs, or even tentacles

2) look at your character from every angle (top, side, behind)

3) add lighting and see what happens, what do the shadows look like?

4) take photos to create different compositions

These are all very helpful tools to create and interesting and dynamic 2-D character.

Here’s the result of Part 2 of the exercise (3-D to 2-D):

Front View

Side View

Side View - bending over

For this bending forward position, I should have exaggerated the “tail” fronds forward to show the forward motion of this movement.

Here’s the results of Part 3 of the exercise experimenting with different drawing materials, drawing styles, and variations of the character. 

Version 2 - drawn with 4B graphite pencil

Version 3 - drawn with Pigma Brush Pen sepia

I can't wait to build another character friend for study!