BBRRR IT'S COLD, DID SOMEONE LEAVE THE WINDOW OPEN?

So then, with the house model and room models done I started on the illustrations depicting various different things. In the first one the house has been covered in a huge snow fall. Big snow drifts, all the cliches of snowy scenes. I tried a few camera angles on the house and decided on the one at the top of the picture to the right. I then used this as a base for the illustration underneath. To the left here are some of the reference images I gathered together from all corners of the internet. Bless it. I thought I was pretty happy with the drawing but coming back to it two days later I realised it was very dull. This is a children's book, it needs to be magical and exciting and interesting and and, well you know, not what this illustration is.

So I went back to the maquette. One of the things I realised with this illustration is the fact you couldn't see Toby's window which I had always decided would be at the back of the property looking over the garden. So I chose a different angle, looking at the back and made it a bit more interesting. I also lowered the slide to make it look like it was buried in snow, top bit of the second picture. Then I decided to just go for it really quickly and loosely and sketch out the sort of thing I had in my head, big curling snow drifts, a snowman, a robin, lots of icicles the works. Basically what I would want to see if I was a kid I think. The final illustration is at the bottom of the 3 and the last picture in this posting. Click on it to see it bigger. Remember these are roughs, so the final artwork will be very close but will probably have extra details and slight changes here and there. The snow falling is put on afterwards with photoshop.

Within this illustration I decided on some of the surrounding landscape [which might change in the final illustrations]. So these decisions had to be carried through to all the other illustrations.I decided against modelling the rest of the surrounding area in the 3D because quite frankly I couldn't be arsed. If it proved difficult then I would.










click on the image to see the large version