My artistic goal for the beginning of 2017 is to create some portfolio pieces that represent the kind of work I'd really like to do. Last year I realized that my career was veering off in a direction I didn't want. It was time to make a course adjustment. Quitting the Explore the Bible series was part of that; making new portfolio pieces is another part.
Every time I visit a bookstore, I find myself drooling over the middle-grade books and feeling intense envy at every artist who gets to illustrate them. I was inspired to make this portfolio piece after a recent "inspiration-and-jealousy-tour" of the local bookstore. I wanted to make a cover designed to appeal to girls, with a pink-and-purple color scheme. I don't remember where the idea of a Egyptian princess came from, but her cat friend came from a desire to try my hand at drawing anthropomorphic animals.
Originally I had a sparkly, magical flying cat.
I was feeling uncertain about the drawing at this point. I couldn't decide if the flying cat looked cute or just kind of cheesy. The pose of the princess was definitely too cliche, too much like the cover of a comedy movie. At this point I almost gave up on the drawing, and set it aside for several days.
After looking at more book covers, I changed the setting to look more like a palace and less like a balcony. As far as I can tell, ancient Egyptian architecture didn't really use arches like this; that's a bit of artistic license on my part.
When designing book covers, I will sometimes add text on top just to make sure that I'm leaving enough room in the illustration. I've never formally studied typography, but I enjoy playing around with fonts.
I also put together some sample interior illustrations for this story, which I will show in my next blog post. Hopefully this is just one of several new portfolio pieces I'll create this year.
This is great! Loving the marble effects on the columns :)
ReplyDeleteFantastic work!!
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