Competition Brief - Macmillan Children's Books - Interior Illustration 1-1

Unfortunately, I didn't have the time today to continue working on this, so I figured I'd just write two separate progress reports for this one instead of clumping it altogether at the end. While it is not yet finished, I felt that quite a bit of progress was made when sketching out the layout for this illustration.

The first scene I decided to illustrate for one of two interior illustrations was the very beginning where Alice lazes around by the river bank as she keeps her sister company. I am quite sure that many will immediately go for the scenes where she is already in Wonderland, and so I thought I would go with something a little more different.

Aside from referring to the opening scene in the Disney version (Because it is still really close to what was originally written in the books), this piece was inspired by Georges Seurat's "A Sunday on La Grande Jatte", while everything else in the piece looks considerably flat if not bland (Including Alice's sister, who appears so prim and proper and she reads her book), Alice sort of breaks away from that entire set up, as shown below.

Though it did take me awhile to figure out what pose to give her.

Also I did have trouble drawing how her skirt would look if she had spread her
legs like in an unladylike but still childish manner.

While I was still trying to figure out her blasted pose, I did roughly doodle in
the river bank and the tree that they would relax under.

After looking through several references, I decided to go with this pose instead.
She is not particularly interested in anything, simply allowing her gaze to wander off.

I don't draw cats as often as I do dogs, and so I needed to look up some references for it...

Lies.

Sometimes I switch between a sketches and silhouettes, but I will add in extra details
for him later on.

With the layout roughly sketched out, I should be able to get this one done in one more day. Much like the illustration, only a few spot colours will be used for the more important things to stand out. (And if I were to fully colour the interior illustrations, I just feel that they will no longer match the book cover as a set)