My essay was a discussion on form follows function in retrospect to children's illustration.
In it I argued that form has become a function of illustration. Especially in children illustration as you have to keep a child engaged with colour and story.
I focused in on the colour aspect of children's illustration, just going crazy with the amount of colour i can use. I'm also concentrating on a theme of the outdoor play because in fiction you can write about absolutely anything and it can all be completely imagined and new, but for children the world is still new so i want to focus on getting joy out of the simpler things in life.
This first page was just on wind because when I was younger and didn't have to care about my hair and appearance I loved being blown about by the wind. plus it seems like an activity that shows a sense of freedom and peacefulness. I played with my brusho inks to make bright swirling colours. Trying to visualise wind.
Just a couple of outdoor activities and more shape, colour and pattern experimentation.
Where the green and red met at the top they kind of distorted each others edges and when i drew around the bumpy collision is made a bush texture.
on this next page i decided to play with the bush shapes and made a big colourful one along with some other aspects of nature.
For this page i swapped up my pen and brush for a paper clip i found. I just wanted to try something new and experiment with it. It was pretty hard to control but i liked that it scratched the surface of the paper and left a texture that you could run your fingers over.
Back to the bush texture i decided to draw a multitude of shrubberies.
For this page i had originally intended to draw lots of my character in different activities. I got reference of a child running and it just didnt go well. so i ended up spending the double spread perfecting it. Now i know my character design better as i decided on an exact head shape; which is an egg.
Big scale character. This was just satisfying to draw after trying to draw it over and over and getting it wrong on the other pages.
I tried to make a visual example of wind.
A bit of character work with facial expressions.
I did a page of good sticks because whenever you were younger and had to go on a long walk it wouldn't be complete without finding a suitable stick to hike with. Talking to others I found that they'd imagined trees as motorbikes and all the pretending games that were played, I like the way they look like ordinary objects but to a child they can be anything.
Putting the character work i learnt with my shrubberies and wind.
After working on this page i was questioning whether or not my character was how i wanted it. So i started trying some different styles out (below) but when i figured the part i disliked about my design most were the eyes, they're hard to convey emotion on and also to make the character look a specific way is hard to convey without pupils.
So a simple change of some new eyes improved it a lot for me. I also made the legs shorter and stumpier because my character didn't quite look child like enough because of the proportions which resembled an adult whereas children have stumpy chubby limbs.
