a peek into my sketchbook: the wind in the willows

so around october time last year, i was sifting through some university work where i was asked to research into some design competitions and find one that i'd one day like to enter, and during my searching i came across the penguin design award and decided that i'd enjoy entering the puffin children's competition, where you're asked to design the book jacket for a classic penguin children's book.

this year's chosen book was the wind in the willows, a story that i was (surprisingly) unfamiliar with as, as a child, i'd never read the book or even seen the film! i received the book as a christmas present, and although i started reading it in january, i've only just finished reading it today! as soon as i'd finished the book, i also set about watching the film from 1995 just so that i understood the characters and story fully so i knew what i'd be working with when it came to developing a book cover idea.

below are a few peeks into my sketchbook, there's not much to show at the moment because i've only spent a couple of hours sketching so far, but it's a start nonetheless! i'll be sure to keep my blog updated with my progress as and when i make it, hopefully within the next couple of weeks as the competition deadline is very soon and i think it would be beneficial for me to at least attempt to enter, just so i can try to somewhat develop a style, my use of colour, composition and my overall character generation.

all four main characters sketched out roughly in a style that i wished to further develop

all four characters developed further with my chosen style and with colour added using watercolour, acrylic and fineliner pens

i've got a long way to go in terms of colour application (i'm fairly new to working with acrylics so it was a bit hard to master controlling them exactly as i'd wished, however i did like the texture they helped me to achieve!) and tweaking my overall style, but i think i'm at a good starting point and it should be fairly straightforward to progress further and a lot of fun, too!

i'm setting myself a few deadlines for this week: to have collected and written up all my timeline information formally by monday evening, to develop some ideas and attempt to finalise them by wednesday evening and to have completely finished my timeline by friday evening. by setting these and sticking to them it will ensure that i have an entire week to look at developing and finalising any work for this book cover. fingers crossed i can work efficiently and stick to my plan!

also, don't forget to follow my blog on bloglovin!

vw family

please view on flickr for a better quality image, blogger destroys it!

everyone who knows me in real life knows that i'm an absolute weirdo about my car. personally, i don't think naming my car and giving her a personality is all that weird, but you know, we're all our own people... anyway, along with my volkswagen lupo and her being my little pea, i've extended the family in that polos are mothers and golfs are fathers, the parents of the lupos (ok it sounds weird now i type it out to myself.)

i'd been debating for a while how i could visually represent this idea of a volkswagen family, and after attempting drawing out cars, i found out that it's hard making a golf look as adorable as a lupo, so i scrapped the idea of using cars and started thinking about others ways to depict it.

i finally landed on the idea of using humans and dressing them up to depict the car models that they were representing, and very simply chose to dress the mother in polo attire, the father in golf attire, and the child in a wolf hat, as lupo means wolf in italian. a simple solution!

lately i've really taken to scanning in textures and illustrating within photoshop, using the textures to add depth to otherwise flat colours, and i've got my latest university project to thank for that as i found out that collaging alone is ridiculously time consuming and (sometimes) stressful, so using technology to push me along really helped to make things a little smoother and gave me a bit more control over exactly it was that i wanted to do.

in other news, i now have three posters completed and an animated banner to make before the end of the week as it's assessment (gulp!) the following thursday and friday... why do i feel as though i'm repeating myself?