Creating playful scenes

When coming up with ideas for illustrations for book ideas, we often sketch rough ideas of what the characters look like, what they are doing, the environment the book is set and the world they inhabit. We come up with lots of designs. Often our sketches are quite unrefined at this stage, scribbling down lots of ideas for scenes and characters. Later we start to think about layout and perspective and creating an intriguing atmosphere.

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We love to experiment with creating intriguing and playful environments, thinking about if its a cold or hot enviroment, what season is it set in, is it night time, who lives there. We also like to think about what colours we want to use. Sometimes its a lot of bright colours, like greens and oranges and yellows, to create a really vibrant scene, full of life. Other times we use just one or two colours, like blues and greys, to create a cold wintery environment.

Little brother and sister sitting in their bedroom

Little brother and sister sitting in their bedroom

Sketchbook

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One of our favourite things about illustration is creating and drawing characters. We reference from lots of different photos and practice drawing different poses and facial expressions. We love giving our characters different personalties and making them come to life.

We experiment with adding colours to the characters clothing, using only a few colours gives our characters a nice feel. We use simple line work to create detail and texture, especially in the hair and on the clothing.

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Drawing elderly people

Drawing elderly people. Experimenting with colours and line work.

Drawing elderly people. Experimenting with colours and line work.

One of the things we love about illustration is designing characters. We are currently drawing elderly people in different scenarios and everyday life. From going to the seaside to reading the newspaper and walking to the shop. We use simple line work to capture the character of the people and use a fine line pen to create subtle details.

A black and white line illustration of an elderly couple enjoying tea and cakes. In fine line pen.

A black and white line illustration of an elderly couple enjoying tea and cakes. In fine line pen.

We decided to keep the colours simple, by only adding a few colours in coloured pencils and leaving some parts white. We wanted to keep the delicate and simple line work, so we kept the colour palette simple to highlight certain areas of the illustration.

How we design and make our character paper puppets

Often when we design characters for children’s books, we come up with little extra designs for paper toys, activity sheets and paper puppets. We base the puppets and toys on characters that we have designed and think of ways we can make them engaging and interactive.

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One of our favourite things to make are paper puppets. We draw our characters out a few times on paper and pick a character that we think would work well as a puppet with movable arms and legs. We draw the full character out on to some paper and then we trace the arms, legs and body separately onto some card. To add colour to our character we usually use coloured pencils and collage. We then cut the body, arms and legs of our character out. We make holes in the top off the legs and arms and attach split pins to the body.

Below is an activity page for children to make their own finger puppets. We use collage on the characters to make them more intriguing and playful. We also create activity pages for children to create their own animal masks, party packs and 3D paper objects.

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Yoga Gorilla

4 pages for a picture-book we have created about a gorilla who is a little bit different. A feel-good story about acceptance and daring to be different. The story follows a gorilla who is not like the other gorillas. He doesn’t beat his chest and charge around. Our gorilla is gentle, calm and thoughtful. His great passion is yoga. Our gorilla loves meditating and preforming relaxing exercises, he just wishes he had someone to share his day with. The other tough weight lifting gorillas think he’s strange and most of the time our gorilla is on his own. Until one day he meets a new friend and learns that its ok to be a little bit different.

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Page 10

Page 10

Jungle activity book finished outcome.

We have been working on a jungle themed activity book for children. We have included lots of activities ranging from designing a jungle character to drawing a hot-air balloon and matching games. Each page is fully illustrated in coloured pencil and digital collage and there is also plenty of space for children to design their own characters.

A drawing activity page. Children can work out the clues to draw the mystery character.

A drawing activity page. Children can work out the clues to draw the mystery character.

We have experimented with each page layout so that some scenes flow across a double page spread (much like a picture book page) and others are more detailed single pages, packed full of activities.

We wanted to make the activity book playful and a bit quirky, so we have developed two witty animal characters to guide you around the activities. We have made it like a story, with the characters going from one place to another, so each page is different and exciting. We have also included craft activities to get children creative, such a making a mask and designing paper bunting.

Jungle games page. Children can match the animals to the sound they make and help Pipkin the pig count all the butterflies.

Jungle games page. Children can match the animals to the sound they make and help Pipkin the pig count all the butterflies.