Competition Brief - Macmillan Children's Books - Inspiration

While searching into scenes that I think would be interesting to illustrate, I also gathered some inspiration on what style to use for . While the brief pretty much states that their target audience is "the parents of girls aged 5-9" and "parents of boys aged 5-9", and "gift givers, such as grandparents, aunts, uncles, etc.", too properly translate, this should be aimed at the children, to make sure that the illustrations are suitable (For the sake of the parents) and eye-catching enough to draw their attention.

Most illustrations either had too much of a japanese influence to them (Too 'anime' that is), are overly detailed (Which probably won't actually be suitable for the young ones) or are just too sexualised, and so I tried extracting the best features from each of these examples in hopes of creating a unique enough style for my illustrations. So far, I have seen most of my peers going with a very simple and cute art style, such as the ones seen at the bottom of this board, and so I have to take this into consideration if I was to go in that direction, to perhaps give my own unique spin to it without taking away too much of the original material.

In the end, I went back to an old mood board I had made and referred to for a past project, as I felt that these illustrations had a much more suitable and unique feel to them for fantasy illustrations (As compared to the previous board, despite the fact that they are Alice illustrations), it definitely gave me a better idea on what drawing and colouring styles to experiment with as well.