« Contos da avó Mané » – Illustration

Hey Hey!

It has been a while… But I got a lot of news for you!

 

During this summer until now I was illustrated another children’s book. It is called « Contos da avó Mané ». The job was offered to me by the same editor as the first book but the author was different.

I accepted the offer right away although the deadlines were tough.

The book includes 2 poems. One of them is about the story of « A cigarra e a Formiga » and the other is about the human body and its internal organs (in a funny way, don’t worry).

I started with the first poem:

• Character Design: This was the hardest step of all… I had no inspiration in the beginning. This story has been told and illustrated so many times that it was a challenge to come up with a new way of representing the animals. Here are my failed attempts on getting the ant character, by order (formiga):

And this was my final version:

• Background: Since I read the poem for the first time I thought that a newspaper background would work. The poem has some words missing so it’s a small exercise for the kids to figure out what is the word missing. To me, this background made sense since it is filled of hidden words!!!
• Brushes/Colors: I decided to use the same brushes for each character to create a certain style. The brush gives a texture of a crayon and I quite liked it. Since there was no reference to colors whatsoever, I used the ones I thought would be best. For the Ant and the Cicada (Cigarra) I made a color pallet because I had to draw them several times:

Most of the illustrations of this poem were not hard and I kept adding more and more detail the characters. Here are all the finished illustrations of this poem:

Hope you like it!

For the second poem things were a bit different…

• Character Design: The poem talked about the human body and it’s organs. They are trying to figure out which organ is the most important one and that should be named president of the whole body. I had to find a way to make our not so attractive organs into something that could be appealing to kids so it was quite hard sometimes (specially with the liver). I have no first sketches of the organs because they all came out at the first try, even if the attempt took days.
• Background: I decided to go for a much simpler background with this poem because the characters themselves already had a lot going on and I didn’t want to turn the images too busy.
• Brushes/Colors: I kept using the same brushes I chose for the first poem and here the colors were already implicit even if the author did not mention them. For example the heart is red, the kidneys brown-ish purple…

Here are my finished illustrations for the second poem!

Here is the cover and the counter cover:

I definitely learned a lot with this project. My relationship with he author was always good and she wants me to illustrate two more books of this collection!!!

Of course it wasn’t always easy due to the deadlines and some miscommunication through emails on the number of illustrations needed but I am still really happy to have gone on board with this!

The book premiere will happen in October and since I am doing Erasmus I won’t be able to attend.

 

Stay tuned 😉