Illustrating a Picture Book: Crocodiles, Koalas and Lambs with Umbrellas

My little croc digging holes on the beach for Baby Can Bounce! is finished:

It proved slightly trickier, because none of the other illustrations have backgrounds, but this one clearly had to have a certain amount of sand for it to make sense. It still had the match the others, though, so a full beach was out. I think this will work: I'm envisaging it ultimately sitting on the yellow background colour we used for the koalas in book 1, so it blends.

The idea is, if possible, to keep the colour palette the same as book 1, or very similar, so they work as a pair as much as possible.

Today I am working on the artwork for the koala character as it happens. In the sequel he's illustrating 'Baby can crawl'. He was originally going to illustrate 'Baby can copy' (which, between you and I, I think is funnier):

Actually, during my first round of roughs, this page didn't feature the koala at all, but the lamb:

I swapped them over, as the lamb worked better than the koala on a different page: 'Baby can splash' needed a character will long enough arms to hold the umbrella in front whilst still remaining visible behind it:

I'm not entirely sure why, but my editor at Egmont wasn't keen on the concept 'copy', so I finally changed it to 'Baby can crawl': 

Phew!


Right, colouring-in here we go...