I felt like the illustration I’d worked on following my research in Oliver Jeffers had gone fairly well.
So I then thought the next best thing would be work on honing and refining it.
It felt a little lost on a big white sketchbook background. So I cut the characters and the knot out of sketchbook and looked for a background to sit them on top of. I found some brown paper, and felt like I made a nice solid textured backdrop without detracting too much attention away from the characters.

Illustration in progress
(before cutting out)

After cutting out from sketchbook
I thought this looked better than the initial version, much more together but still wasn’t happy.
I re-sized the image using GIMP (an online image editing program like Photoshop). See the result below…

I think these does look like the best refinement of the design. But I’m still not sure that I like the design. It just looks a little random!
We’re in real time now so the next posts I do will be reflecting as I go rather than retrospectively.