Jamie Simmons has created a beautiful double page spread as part of the Illustrating Children’s Books Diploma Course. Read Jamie’s experiences of the process below…
“I did individual studies of each bird I wanted to use, before I sketched them in on the page. I then started colouring in the birds, and then did the wash after. This was a technical mistake. I had coloured the larger black areas with dark lamp blank watercolour pans, which reactivated when the background wash was applied, and the black seeped out into the background. The wash also dripped down over the birds, ruining any white of the original page I had preserved. It was all around not working well.
I decided to get a new sheet of paper and approach it again, this is the one I finished and have sent in. I invested in masking fluid to mask off the birds and did the background wash first.
I decided to tidy up the mistakes in photoshop, as the medium for the brief wasn’t ever strictly watercolour. I feel the final piece came out very nicely, and now looks like it could be put on display.”
Jamie Simmons
Illustrating Children’s Books Diploma
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