These past year I have been working on a very special project; I've been illustrating a children's book! My childhood friend, Ekaterina Petrova, approached me with a story idea late last year and we decided to collaborate. 7 months, 31 illustrations, and 1 cover later, its finished and available for purchase via Amazon!
The final illustrations are done with pastels but the roughs, layouts, final line-work and final colors are all digital. This was done to save time on the 'pre-production' and allow for flexibility in the images early in the process. I thought this would make the final step, illustrating with pastels, very tedious but I found the process surprisingly freeing and I was able to have some spontaneity even with thorough plans. I guess it is like performing a dance, a lot of practice goes in but the final performance will still feel fresh because the kinks have been ironed out and we are left to focus on the art of the performance.
Click on images bellow for some some step-by-step descriptions of the process:
Also, I made a gif to show the evolution of the last page, I think the changes are fun to see in sequence :)