Drawing a Picture Book: Moving Forward Slowly

Do you ever have a task that you just can't seem to quite get finished? That's how I've been feeling about the two illustrations I've been working on for the last week.

Perhaps it's partly because I've had only the limited reference of the little dancing endpaper vignettes stuck to my desk, but I suppose it's mostly because they are both a bit fiddly.

The illustration above is Sparky telling Lucy that he won't swap back yet - he wants to have a go at ballet class (although clearly he's going to have trouble with those tiny shoes!). This is the rough I had a bit of trouble getting right. The publisher decided they liked this layout best.

The illustration below comes slightly later, after Sparky has been humiliated in class. Lucy is expecting him to want to swap back now (but she's in for a nasty surprise). If you're interested, I explained earlier on how I designed the drawing for this image.

I decided to work on the two pieces together, like earlier, as they featured the same characters, so it made it easier to keep them consistent, but also helped me to choose the colours of people's outfits, hair colour etc, having both contexts in front of me (I wanted to get a nice even balance of colours across both pictures).

At last I finished both illustrations on Monday, at 6.30pm - I was determined not to stop work until I had done. Still, after John mounted them up for me this morning, I noticed I had missed off Lucy's sock tail on the smaller piece, so had to quickly pop it on and I have just this minute noticed that Lucy's eyebrows are missing - she doesn't look smug enough without them!

Both these illustrations of Lucy also need some mud, from the earlier incident where she is digging holes in the garden, but I want to wait until the earlier pieces of artwork come back from the publishers, to make absolutely sure I put all the mud splodges in the right place.