More Paintings and Taking Inspiration From Pinterest Board

As I've not been able to access some places to draw from life, unlike The New Forest for woodland scenes, people & architecture, I've instead gathered some images from my Pinterest board that I've been keeping to draw from and have as inspiration. 

For the images below for example I had to look up the Northern Lights for reference and igloos.

This was a painting produced earlier but I prefer the later one I did (below) as I feel it reflects the atmosphere (danger & mystique) of the situation better. The first one almost feels like there is too much going on, distracting from what is actually happening.

Gerda and Bae; to emphasise the joy and wonder they both feel at seeing the Northern lights, I did this as a double page spread so the scenery stands out as much as the characters.

This was again, not originally going to be one of the images in the book but I think it is quite successful as the characters being silhouettes creates more dramatic emphasis of the night. It is also quite different from my other paintings which is good as I want to vary them a bit.

Here I've begun small drawings that could be an addition to the pages of my final book. I like the idea of adding the toy soldiers in as although they aren't "alive" in the book there's a certain characteristic to them that makes you almost believe they are real (similar to Gerda in the story)

This idea for an image came from seeing a picture of a wisteria tree on Pinterest. They are quite unique trees and as the old lady's garden is full of wonderful and different flowers/plants as described in the story, I thought this was fitting. I depicted Gerda wondering through the beautiful wisteria flowers looking joyous but the tree that fills up most of the page and completely surrounds her, also represents how lost she is - physically far from home and mentally her thoughts are far from Kai and her original goal. Purple incidentally is also the colour symbolising magic.

Presentation Document Launch Workshop

Today, in a Presentation Document workshop at uni, we were all had five minutes to draw the first thing that came to our heads. The practice was meant to make it clear to ourselves and others what we are like and what inspires us basically and I did find it surprisingly revealing. I ended up drawing the doodle shown below:

It was the first thing I thought to draw because I am inspired by anything magical or out of this world. I enjoy designing and illustrating worlds from props to characters and so I drew an imaginary castle on a hill. This was also probably partly in my head because my project is fairy tale illustrations. This exercise has reconfirmed to me that in the future I do want to be illustrating narratives and creating my own concepts for a story book.