Narrative Illustration/ Development. Mock ups

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.