Today’s creativity vibe: I am working on a new book and deciding on the illustrative style.
This had me thinking about the (crazy) development of Chameleon Cat! See, during this book’s development, I went through three very different illustrative styles in order to land on the final. The first was a traditional style. I created two clay models to draw from and created the first concept art (shown here).
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Although I think this would have been a really pretty book (like Scarlet’s Symphony), it didn’t hit my target audience’s preference of brighter colors, simplistic shapes, and overall happy/fun images. So I moved to style #2: a complete departure from the first. Again I started with clay figures that you can check out in the Radish Lane Art Studio: http://www.radishlane.com/making-of-chameleoncat. Style #2 got very geometric. Fun— but almost too robotic. For the final style #3, I combined the successful elements and treatments from #1 and #2: geometry plus a realistic anatomy of the characters. I decided to use a combination of aquamonolith colored pencils, colored pencils and a digital finish to put this book together.