Illustration, The Universe and Everything

I've had a move around in here. A fresh lick of paint and a furniture shuffle is all you need to brighten up the place. Maybe I'll get a vase of daffodils to put on the table.

This week I've been working on backgrounds for my picture book style. Mark and I came up with a new idea for a story and he's furnished me with three layouts to work on in time for the Bologna Book Fair at the end of April. He's given me some great ideas of how to build on all the work I've been doing with watercolour and saltwash. If you look at all the work recent stuff, you'll see that none of the characters have a background. It wasn't intentional as such, I just wasn't sure how to approach it in a way that didn't make it all look too "samey" and one-dimensional.

Here are my first experiments. I've been trying out painting over collaged papers.

This one is watercolour over squared paper, the second an acrylic wash over the same.





This is acrylic over raffle tickets.



And gouache (apologies for the difficulty in seeing this one. It's very pale.)



The acrylic gives a nice base over the squared paper, but with the acrylic/raffle tickets version I put the paint on too thickly for the coloured pencil to adhere to without it looking patchy.

The gouache one seems to work the best - it can look like thicker acrylic, but has the added advantage of a nice chalky surface to draw over. The watercolour was just pants.

Right, more experiments to get one with!