Children's Illustration Inspirations

This past January I took a children's illustration online course taught by Joy Chu of the Got Story Countdown Blog. You can see/read about it here. The class was AWESOME! I learned so much and produced a lot of narrative sketches that I can now look over to create finished works. After a busy spring and summer, I am ready to settle into creating new artwork for my children's book portfolio, in preparation for attending the February SCBWI (Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators) Conference in New York City.

As part of the assignments for the children's illustration course, we had to check out 10 picture books every week based on different criteria, such as "character," "locale," etc. Now that I'm searching around for inspiration on what kind of images I would like to create, I'll post some of the images I found here. I'm not going to include links because that would take me forever to finish this post, so you'll have to just google an illustrator that you fancy.

And now for a mother-load of children's book illustration!

 "Watching," by Suzy Chic and illustrated by Monique Touvay. I love the story and message about the benefits of waiting, and the gentle illustrations. I like how she depicts scenes and passing of the seasons in small, soft panels of images. and of course I like hand-written text.

 "The Twelve Dancing Princesses and Other Tales from Grimm" illustrated by Lydia Postma. Her illustrations are so finely detailed, gorgeous, and fantastical. Love her use of color.

"Little Red Riding Hood" illustrated by Bernadette Watts. The landscapes were the star of this book.

"The Mitten" by Alvin Tresselt and illustrated by Yaroslava. I like the graphic rendition of this story and simplified use of color.

Again, I like the graphic simplicity and use of the color yellow in this simple wordless book by Henrik Drescher called "The Yellow Umbrella."

Oh, how I wish I could make watercolor paintings like Jon Klassen in "This is Not My Hat"! He has such a great style.

In the book "Chloe," Peter McCarty makes the cutest rabbits imaginable. I love his soft, simple style.

Love the crazy and slightly grotesque party scenes in "Bumble-Ardy" by Maurice Sendak.

 Shaun Tan has got SKILLS!!! "Lost and Found" collects three of his books in one volume. He does such an amazing job at mixed media. His imagination is many worlds deep.

I really enjoy the illustrator Ana Juan. In her books "Elena's Serenade" and "Frida" she utilizes rounded shapes and harmonious color schemes.

"The Boy Who Drew Birds" by Jacqueline Davies and illustrated by Melissa Sweet. I found out that I enjoy children's biographies. This one is about John James Audubon. Melissa Sweet's artwork is so whimsical and I like how she adds found objects into her watercolor illustrations. I think that I have trouble when I try to do mixed media, because there's a danger of things looking too busy, but she does a fantastic job. "A Splash of Red: The Life and Art of Horace Pippin" is also a really good one illustrated by Melissa Sweet.

A very unusual wordless book called "The Grey Lady and the Strawberry Snatcher" by Molly Bang. A friend of mine recommended this book to me as his favorite picture book. The characters are mysterious, and Bang makes great use of negative space in these spreads. Molly Bang also wrote "Picture This: How Pictures Work" which our teacher drew upon to teach us about visual perception.

"Drawing from Memory" by Allen Say. A very interesting autobiography of how Say became an artist. This wasn't really a picture book like the others I read, but it was very inspirational.

I hope you've been inspired!

Children's Book Dummies

It has been awhile since I've posted. The winter has slowed me down, but I've also been keeping busy. I started an online course back in January called "Illustrating Books for Children" with Joy Chu, art director, awesome teacher, and author of the blog Got Story Countdown. I just finished my last assignment, a 32-page dummy. For those who don't know, a dummy is a mock-up or "sketch" version of a picture book. Joy emphasized that we keep our drawings very simple because this stage of illustration is used to work out the important storytelling and to establish character, composition, sequencing, pacing, and readability. That last part is harder than it seems - there were times when I didn't question that what I was depicting was obvious, but then found out that someone was confused by it. Very important to get right!

I'm keeping this post brief because I'm feeling tired today (still recovering from staying up till 4 in the morning to complete the last assignment!), but here is some of the work I produced for the class. Each of the assignments was based off a pre-existing story, but modified or changed in some way to make the story our own. At first I was hoping to write my own original stories (the closest to that was my last assignment), but I realized it was a good thing we weren't trying to work on the writing and illustration at the same time. That would have been too much! Also, the emphasis was on being able to convey a story for the most part wordlessly, without relying on text as a crutch to explain what was going on. enjoy these little snippets, and I'll be back with more detailed descriptions later! You may also view all of my work for the class here.