Narrative Illustration/ Development. Constructing the illustrations

With the completion of the mock up designs, construction on my final Illustrations can begin. To start this process the mock up sketches were placed on a light box and carefully taped in place using low stick masking tape. For the Illustrations I was using A3 watercolour paper, which I placed over the top of the mock up sketch.  Following this I used the mock up sketches as a guide line which meant I wasn’t fully tracing the design, I was adding to it. I like working like this because I can make small last minute decisions and tweak the designs. In some cases I can use tracing paper to help with a design tweak. If this goes wrong then it’s simply a case of re drawing but thanks to the light box, this is made much faster. 

Some of my finals were outlined using brush and ink instead of a pen. It’s hard to notice the difference and I tried this purely because I wanted to see the result in my work. I think working with brush and ink is much more satisfying and versatile than with a pen but less convenient. A pen is much easier to carry around and leaves less mess and room for error. Most of the illustrations were completed using pen because of this convenience. When the basic outline is taken from the mock up using the light box, details can be added separately. I don’t need the light box for this process as it includes shading and adding further details to the design, which were not on the mock up sketch.

When the line work has been completed the Illustrations are ready for the watercolour. I had previously chosen my colour pallat, based on what I thought would work with the illustrations and story. I simply started to colour the illustration using layers of watercolour paint and occasionally some brightly coloured ink. 

This process went pretty well for my illustrations but I found that the colours varied slightly between each one of the finals. This was the problem with colouring them at different times as I had to re mix my pallet each time I came back to work, making the colour mixes slightly off each time. I’m not too concerned about this for most of my illustrations but it seems to stand out on a few in particular, one example would be Illustation five as it seems much darker than the rest. Once I go to digitally clean the images I may be able to fix this by adjusting the hue in Photoshop.  

On a related note I did make some major change to one of the illustrations. I completed illustration two but was not happy with the result so I went back and re designed the entire drawing. The changes were mainly to the background and colour selection. This was one of my first attempts at a final piece witch is why the colours appear washed out. the background was simply boring to look at so I changed it to be more interesting by adding foliage.

For some of the Illustrations I went back over the design and added a layer of white gouache paint. This was for emphasis and to bring back the lighter areas which had too much colour. I only used this in some places such as Illustration seven for the Cloud Men and Illustration nine for the Empire State Building.  The finals are not yet complete as they still need some digital attention. This is where they will be cleaned, enhanced and cropped.