Design

So Now I have the rough ideas of what I am working on, I need to go out to a few woodland areas and parks nearby to experiment with photography, panoramic photos and compositions, especially for my spread page.

I’m going to work more on the thumbnails, and whittle those down into a few ideas for each spread, 1/2 page, cameo and spot designs.

I then need to work on granulation experiments, working with the granulation medium, and showing my results of those with the different paint colours and measurements of the liquid applied.

I need to work on my character design for the ‘fern man’ idea, and see if I can bring him to life, and what character he will have.

Think about a silent book or a book with few words, think more about imagination.

Also I need to think about my idea of bubble houses and how this sits with the ideas I already have.

Collage / cut outs

I started with taking some pictures of fern plants, I couldn’t find any out in nature at the moment due to the time of the year and the fern leaves hadn’t grown yet! So I went to some garden centres and supermarkets and took some pictures of the house plants there.

I printed these off on my printer and cut them out, and used the pictures to pull together a face type collage for the ‘Fern mans’ head.

As you can see the young leaves are curled around which make great eyes for the character, and the leaves at the top make great hair, I wasn’t sure about the beard style leaves, I thought it looked a bit like an alien, and wanted the character to be more softer, friendly.

Character design

I moved the image onto my iPad and used the hair ferns from the collage to build around the face, I thought this made him look softer.

I then drew some different poses of the man, now at the moment the ‘Fern man’ is a man with a fern face, but I do want to turn him into a creature rather than a man, so I will continue to develop the character further.

After a break of a few days I had thought more about my fern man character, and I think I want to make hime a creature rather than a man, so from my trip to the woods I came across a few ferns in the undergrowth of the trees, so I am going to create a fern body for my face, and think about ways the fern creature would move.

So here he is as a little creature, I need to finish him off, but I will paint him in watercolours and add the facial details then. I also did a few more creatures but this time taller fern trees characters, but I’m not sure these look like carrots!

Thumbnails

I started by creating some more thumbnails from my expedition to the woods, mainly on ideas for composition and the types of illustrations I’ am thinking about.

Compositions

I started to work on some more compositions a few cameos and 1/2 pages of some ideas on what illustrations to include.

For colour palettes and swatches and experimentation on granulation please see the research section.

Art work

After working out how granulation fluid works properly, I started to make a few background texture sheets for the illustrations using the pipette and watercolours in a wet on wet process.

This had some good effects, but it was still quite hard to use, the whole paper was soaking wet to apply enough fluid to make the granulation work, so I’m not sure if these way of working will be ok, as I need some of the paper to be not crinkled and dry!

Luckily as its any birthday soon I was able to get a small set of self granulating paints, so I swatched these out to see what the effect was and would they work better than the granulation fluid? I got the Schmincke Horadam galaxy set of Galaxy pink, Galaxy violet and Galaxy black.

They still need to dry but will insert a picture once the paint has dried and the granulation has stopped.I found that these worked better straight away, they were easier to use, you didn’t need loads of fluid or water to activate them, and they gave a better effect, and I think on a larger surface you will be able to see the texture more.

Bubble houses

I kept thinking about my idea of bubble houses over the last few days and the idea has flourished a bit. I have looked into how I can create bubbles through painting, and also how this will sit within the composition of two of the illustrations.

I worked on creating bubbles with the watercolours, I started with using a empty toilet roll tube and dipped that in the paint, and pressed it on the paper, then used a wet brush to spread the paint from the edge to the middle to create a bubble like effect.

I then went on to use a smaller bottle top to create the same effect but smaller bubbles.

Story idea

The basic story idea so far is that when the sun is shinning sometimes when your outdoors in a park, garden or wood you can see little specks of dust, pollen or seeds floating around the atmosphere, in the sky in the air, the sun and light catch them.

What if those specks where actually little houses, a little universe that can only able to be seen by certain people!

The place were you are mostly likely to see these ‘bubble houses’ are in the deep woods, where the places are dark, damp and foresty.

Who lives in these ‘bubble houses’ fern creatures of course!