Donna Dyson, the funny, beautiful, energetic and charismatic educator and children's book author has been busy and inspired in writing the Muttaburrasaurus children's book series for the Museum I work at. I'm so grateful to have met Donna. She really brings the sunshine with her wherever she goes and she reminds me that life should be full of fun, learning and inspiration. I'm also grateful to have been asked to illustrate the children's book series after nearly 25 years in the creative industries as a graphic designer, it has been a long wait to land a job like this. So I really want to make Donna proud and breathe life into the Muttaburrasaurus character.
This is a very rough test using Painter 11 with some painting techniques and mediums, charcoal, pastel, ink, etc. I need to work out a very fast digital method of applying colour and tone to these drawings. When studying with Gregory Rogers, an amazing Australian children's picture book illustrator, I learned that it is customary for illustrators to sketch the entire book out in pencil first. No colour is applied whatsoever until the publisher has approved the drafts and they are final and signed off. Then the colouring process begins. This makes complete sense knowing how time consuming each part of the process is. One can't be going back and forth in an ad hoc manner, changing and re-rendering scenes. So I am not too concerned about the final effect at the moment, I still need to get into the skin of the character and understand how he moves, feels, expresses himself and I need to be able to easily visualise him from any angle, position, with any props and inside an environment that I construct from my imagination. Its not a simple task, but the beauty of end result is bound to be endlessly rewarding from a creative perspective. And I am really looking forward to doing a wonderful job on these. Regardless of the limitations of time frames and the fact that Uni starts back next week and I will be learning HTML and CSS and Flash animation at the same time. Life can't get any more exciting than this. In fact, how does it get better than this!?
