Tuesday 23 July 2013

Poppy Fields - Murder Mysteries


Illustration!! on my blog! Imagine! I've held off posting any of this project for so long, but there seems to be enough of it out there available to buy now. I started them in Oct 2010, that's how long things can take in the publishing World! There are 10 books in the series by Tanya Landman and I was very happy to be asked to work on the illustrations for the redesign of all the covers. It's been a great job and I'm very lucky to have worked with a brilliant designer, Jack Noel, at Walker Books. He's a illustrator too... and it's really helped us work through these. It was fun depicting the murder scene for each book, but deciding how to show the 'corpse' wasn't always easy for a kids book! I'm very happy with the whole set, although some of my favourites aren't available yet. Here are the first 5... which is actually the first 4 and the 10th. We started at number 10 and then started working back through them. I shall dig out some of the sketches for these and show a bit of the process in a future post. for now just those covers. I don't know what it is with these pre-teen fiction books, but they seem to be my thing these days! It used to be ideas based editorial work, but things have definitely shifted. I actually enjoy the great big drawing work-out that these kind of projects bring! Right, the covers...





The previous covers


3 comments:

  1. Scott, these are AWESOME!! I don't think I've seen much/any of your drawings with full in backgrounds. Each scene great. I love the looks and stances of the onlookers. Nice job with the dead people too. Ha.

    110% improvement on the old covers.

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  2. Thanks Ron! ... you won't see much of my work with backgrounds.. for good reason! The other set of books I'm working on will probably see the end to future backgrounds all together. I really should have paid more attention to the principles of perspective. I've invented my own, i just eye-ball it! Anyhow, all these books are the reason why there are so few pots or sorting glaze and kiln (frankly it's been nice to have an excuse!) There have been a few pots made though, i'll have pics soon hopefully.

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  3. Omg, these are so great! For some reason when I saw them I was reminded of the Magic Treehouse books Wesley used to read. I loved reading those pre teen and teen books when Wes was younger. Now she has me re reading F. Scot Fitzgerald,ha!

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