Your creative ticket
Your creative ticket
Illustrative work, whatever the medium.
Project brief Commission by independent author Jan ten Sythoff to illustrate two of his children’s short stories. Toys is about a boy whose toys start to war with each other. Jan provided the manuscript and some ideas for the composition for four illustrations. We delivered the final document design as a PDF with the text …
Project brief Commission by independent author Jan ten Sythoff to illustrate two of his children’s short stories. Meatballs is about a boy who makes friends with an alien. Jan provided the manuscript and some ideas for the composition for four illustrations. We delivered the final document design as a PDF with the text and full-colour …
Traditional painting exercise I used traditional watercolour and brushes to brush up on the process that a child may use to draw their favourite characters. I selected a minor player in the Kitten Mews series of picture books that are in development. The elephant’s Gerald, who will have a sibling (also an elephant FYI, as …
My dummy book of the classic fairy tale, created for Penguin’s 2018 “Draw Now” WriteNow programme. The brief This year’s Penguin WriteNow requirement was to create new illustrations for a potential new edition publication of a picture book ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. The existing text was provided and the brief was the standard dummy book …
Dummy picture book for author-illustrator agent representation I have prepared a full dummy PDF of the 32-page picture book ‘Looking For My Eye’ by Jeff West. It contains black-and-white rough layouts of all interior pages and spreads, plus front and rear covers. Full-colour artwork of the front cover and pp 22-23 spread is also included. …
If I’m immersed and emotionally engaged with the work, the results will have more chances of engaging the customer and the audience as well. If I’m just going through the motions, then the work itself will probably come across as dry and mechanical. And so the key that unlocks engagement always comes down to finding that vehicle which allows empathy to become passion and flow out as creativity and conversation.
Dummy book PDF is ready for an author-illustrator picture book agent. Contact Jeff West to look inside!
Return from The Far Side I was delighted to read that Gary Larson, creator of The Far Side … comic? was considering a return to the drawing board, right here in 2020. Or rather, a return to the digital tablet. I blundered into this world in 1987 on my first trip to the USA, buying …
Childhood memory Drawing animals is one of my strongest early childhood memories and when I started the character design for Yggy, I recalled a certain image. Fortunately, I still had the original reference; “The Ladybird Book of African Mammals“. Back to school One session in my refresher course “Drawing Skills” at what is now Greater …
Playfulness and the exchange of creative stimuli came to the top and defined the way I want to engage with social media in a way that’s organic, fun and would help me and others keep growing and experimenting. I went back to my sketches and doodles and decided to turn them into digital posts that could be used as prompts to inspire other people too.
