After completing the basic thumbnails I now want to make them
more legible. The secondary thumbnails (or mock ups) will help me in drawing the
final piece as I will use them as a guideline. To make these I simply look at
my already existing thumbnails and decide on a final design. This could just be
a better drawing of a thumbnail of a combination of a few. I also will draw
them larger as the first thumbnails were too small to use.
In the first illustration I wanted to show the house overlooking the
ocean. I had already thumbnailed this and had a good ideas of how I wanted the
drawing to look. I chose thumbnail one and thumbnail five to base the mock up
drawing on. I wanted the shape and
composition from thumbnail one and the fence that wraps round the hill from
thumbnail five.
I then worked out a good size to draw this new
interpretation. Remembering that the size I chose for this would roughly be the
size of the final illustration. Then I began to draw out this design. It didn’t
have to be perfect, just good enough for me to use later. This mock-up was first
drawn in pencil and then pen on cheap printer paper. This is good because if I find
that i'm unhappy with the result I can quickly and cheaply re draw the mock up
After completing this mock up I went on to do this for the
rest of the thumbnails. It’s quite a quick proces but really helps with the
final illustrations. Some were easier than others, for example mock up four had the most small changes. This was possibly one of the most complicated of
the bunch as there were a lot of characters on show and it was difficult to fit
them all in. I left this design fairly vague in my thumbnail so I could work it
out at this point. Looking at the book for reference I began to re position all
the characters in the image. The book describes ladybird and spider sitting on a chair next to grasshopper, as are earthworm and centipede. Silk worm
is tucked in a corner and glow worm is hanging from the roof. I incorporated all
this into the image as well as James. After several attempts I found a design
that worked for the story.
I also had to change mock
up seven, this featured the cloud men. I was happy with my first mock up
but I found it to be a bit clunky. I had designed the cloud men based on fantasy
dwarfs, due to the fact that they work constantly and I could give them cloud
beards. This was a fun concept but in the book the cloud men are described as
having very few features. In the end the whole thing wasn’t working for me
so I decided to change the design, this time trying a vinyet look. I also
changed the design of the cloud men to have less features and be connected to
the cloud.
