Sketchbook Skool – Illustrate a book cover

I have had so much fun doing this! Following on from the success of my drawing of my first day of school, I decided to stick with the style and theme of schooldays. I was lucky not to suffer at the hands of bullies, the closest I ever got was to be bumped into by this big girl whenever she walked by. At the time I spent so much of my time in books and in the imaginary worlds in my head that I barely noticed and certainly paid her no attention, which I am sure in retrospect must have annoyed her greatly. I did my first drawing in pencil but then froze in indecision- what colours to use? what if I mess it up?

I thought about making it more cartoon like. I traced the outline with a view to doing the colouring in Photoshop. But something wasn’t right. I suddenly didn’t like my heroine. She had stupid hair and I wanted to shake her. The solid line didn’t work.

 I had done a little research on the covers of the books written by my favourite author when I was a little girl…

and had a play with some different layouts and colour schemes.

I then decided to go back to basics and do a watercolour wash over my drawing. I scanned the sketchbook page, and then printed the image onto cartridge paper for painting. That solved the problem of ruining my drawing!

All I had to do was get better at watercolours. In the end I used coloured pencils as well as I was getting impatient to finish this project. Another scan and some more messing about in photoshop resulted in this:

which I then had to print out and wrap round a book to see how it looked in real life. Ta dah!

Now if only I could churn out enthralling school based stories as quickly as Enid Blyton did I would be rich…