Rosie and Ned and the Creepy Cave
deadline met and feelin' fine
I now have a freshly cleaned drawing board (*happy sigh* . . . a clean workspace feels so full of potential), after sending off final artwork for Rosie and Ned and the Creepy Cave, the third in a series by award-winning author Meredith Costain, to be published by Puffin in July this year. (I also blogged about this project here.)
This adventure allowed me to draw a spooky old cottage with a witchy inhabitant, a creepy cave and satisfyingly suspenseful situations — all those kinds of things I LOVED in books (and tv :) when I was young. It's so fun to get to illustrate the type of book I loved to read.
Here's a teeny sneak peek . . .
images © 2010 Tina Burke
from "Rosie and Ned and the Creepy Cave" written by Meredith Costain
Published by Penguin Books 2010
revisiting rosie
↓ These are some my original character sketches I made when first designing Rosie and Ned for the first book - Rosie to the Rescue. I love the characters in this series, and really enjoyed working on these books and in the b/w technique, so I was thrilled to hear that Meredith had written a third in the series! Yay!
I'm about to start on the final cover art for 'Book 3', then we move on to the internal illustrations. The cover is generally the first stage of final artwork to be done, so it can be used for any marketing purposes by the publisher.
These are 'chapter books', aimed at young readers. Chapter books are typically text/story driven, with lots of black and white internal illustrations throughout, so the front and back covers are the only colour work involved. This allows me to have a bit of fun with it, though as this is a series there obviously needs to be consistency in the style from book to book.
Normally I do my children's book illustrations in watercolour, which allows me to leave a strong emphasis on the drawn line; watercolour is soft and transparent so I can have a lot of fun getting the drawing precisely how I want it, then add the colour without blotting out the facial expression or any subtle linework I want to keep. In my own picture books, I use text very sparingly and tell a lot of the story through the characters facial expressions and poses, so it's important I'm able to get the message across clearly through my drawing.
For the covers of these chapter books, however, I decided to go with acrylic as I wanted really strong, bright and bold colours for a dynamic cover - plus, in a nutshell, I love working in acrylic so was happy to have an excuse to use it!
