Dinosaurs Are Back!

If you're a regular reader, you will recall me talking about a dinosaur project I've been working on, with Tony Mitton. It started life as a single picture book, Dippy Diplodocus but Kingfisher decided to divide the artwork up and turn it into two separate books (see Gnash Gnaw Dinosaur!).

The first title, Gnash, Gnaw, Dinosaur!, is ready to go now, and coming out in June. Amazingly, I only need to do one extra piece of artwork to make the split possible: the opening spread for the second book, Rumble, Roar, Dinosaur!

The brief came through last week. It is to be a similar sort of illustration to the first page of Gnash, Gnaw, Dinosaur, introducing the various dinosaurs featured. This is the intro page from book one:

I have just finished the rough for book two. The publisher sent me a print-out of the text I had to incorporate, at actual size. I used this to work out a first draft, by sketching directly onto the sheet (the faint line running down the centre is the book's crease, or 'gutter', where no text or dinosaur's faces must cross).

The reason the draughtsmanship is not less scrappy for a first sketch, is that of course I designed all the dinosaurs previously, when I did the bulk of the work. So all I had to do was find a way to arrange them.

There are swimming, land-based and flying dinosaurs in each book, so it was a challenge creating an environment to show them all together, and hard to make it different from the first book. This is the final, tidied up rough which I emailed to Kingfisher for approval:

I have drawn a more rocky setting for the new illustration and intend to use colour to really make the difference. I will base the rocks on the colours I saw in Australia, so it will be very orange, purple and pink, like this piece I did recently:

If you want to find out more about how I drew this pastel illustration, see Cover Gets Colour, where I give a step-by-step account of the process.