How the Elephant Got Its Trunk.

This story as rather simple, very much so a children's book. I picked this because I haven't explored children's illustrations yet through any of my projects and its something I'm interested in.

Artists that come to mind-

Beatrix potter.

I am more than happy to revisit Beatrix potters work. I had a lot of her books growing up and have always been interested in her as a person and her work style. I have visited the museum dedicated to her in the lakes and I have been fortunate enough to see her work in person at the V&A in London a couple years ago.

Beatrix worked in watercolour and dip pen to bring her lovely drawings to life. She was very inspired by where she lived too, the lake district, I grew up here and can see how she was so inspired. Unfortunately the book I have to work with involves elephants (not a very local animal last time I checked) and is based in Africa, I, unlike Beatrix, now have the power of google to make sure I get my colours right. Unless of course I want to take a more modern route..

Judith Kerr

Another absolute classic illustrated book that comes to mind would be the tiger who came to tea by Judith Kerr. although she has illustrated a lot of other successful books, this is definitely the one that stands out to me. its beloved so much that it was recently made into an animated version to be released for Christmas.

After a little research online I managed to find some scans of her original sketches and I find these very interesting to look at!

I read an interview she had not long before she passed about her process and she explained that there was a lot of sketching and rubbing out before anything was final. she would finish her work with gouache, inks, coloured pencil and sometimes black pen for the line work.
Here is the link if youre interested in seeing more like I was:
https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-tiger-who-came-to-tea-by-judith-kerr-sketches-and-original-artwork

I really like how her work is mainly vignette style, a lot of her artwork uses blank space to its advantage too, for example leaving all the walls and furniture white alongside the paper colour really adds pop where she decided to draw attention. For example the tiger, who is obviously centre stage.

Patrick Benson.

Patrick Benson is the artist for the very popular children's book owl babies.

While looking as his other work I noticed he had illustrated an elephant! If that isn't a good reference for this project I'm not too sure what is honestly.
I like the colour pallets he uses and the texture he makes with fine liner but I don't particularly like the style its drawn in, for example the eyes and mouth aren't very expressive.

Research.

Very early into the first week of this 3 week project I had a talk with Dwayne about how to approach the task. He said that research shouldn't be looking at other examples of kids books like I had done previously as that's basically just inspiration and rather to research something that would change the outcome of my illustrations more drastically.
At first I went to the library and had a look around the different artist books, I came across a book of old unusual floral pattern and was inspired by the colors of some as shown below-

African tribal art.

I wanted to use something different to inspire the art of this book and I came across african tribal art while looking up tradition artworks from Africa. I like the repetitive colours and patters and so I attempted to mimic this in my own way for the cover of the book.

Sketchbook work

The cover.

The initail artwork I would work on for my final cover was drawn on paper with a mix of watercolour and coloured pencil.

Here's how the scan of the original drawing turned out, I was pretty happy with this but knew it needed a lot more work done to make it cover worthy.

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I took the image into photoshop and added a texture for the elephants skin, I also played around with the contrast and saturation.

single page.

double page spread.

I really enjoyed the textured look in the single page and although I didn't like the outcome too much I wanted to try harder with this one from the start. I used the canvas board again and sketched out my characters before roughly painting the colours with loose watercolour, after this I added sea salt. I wasn't so sure that this would end up showing through in the final edit of the image so I created the background in the same way, unfortunately I forgot to take a photo of the progress, though.

I love the colours and textures you can see in this final piece the most out of all three, although I feel the type could have been a lot stronger. Typography is admittedly not my strong suit and as I was nearing the deadline of this project I took the leap on writing it by hand as I usually get stuck with fonts and placement for a long time. Although it could have been better I still don't mind how it looks, I added a faint drop shadow which I think helps it stand out more.

Final mockups.