Student Sarah Buckingham has submitted her final set of work for the Illustrating Children’s Books Diploma Course. We have added some text that accompanied Sarah’s artwork to tutor Maggy Roberts which we felt was an interesting read. Congratulations Sarah on the completion of your course, we wish you the best of luck for the future with your illustrations!
The final assignment was a challenge in that it demanded bright inviting colours, leading me away from my wishy-washy watercolour preference. I spent a lot of time working on how I wanted to represent the tortoises’ shiny shell. I was keen to experiment with mixed media for this submission so I set about creating the characters out of paper mosaic, using a decoupage method to bring them together. I was pleased with the result and I have attached a photo of these characters. However, when I took this further and started to create the final piece, I found that the result was cluttered and almost too simple and I didn’t feel it worked. I did like my tortoise and birds though, so I took them back into paint form, using gouache, to keep the colours bright and stated. I enjoyed my use of shiny pebbles in the decoupaged tortoise, which is why I brought this idea along, referencing my use of them with pebbles on the left-hand page, I also felt that this created some flow from the first page to the second. I introduced a fourth bird, “Duck” to balance the work and to bring some more colour and life.
Overall, I am pleased with this piece. I was bold (relatively) with the colour. I felt that my work got a little tight and I lost some of my looseness at times. I wondered if I had too many characters in the end but then I wanted it to be engaging and so I compromised on space.
I found it difficult to represent the fluffing of feathers but then maybe the text is there to say that and I am just creating the first part of that image.
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