I’m slowly making progress with getting the finished layouts and illustrations done for A BED FOR LITTLE CUB.   The pressure is on to have these pictures finished by 25 August!   It’s at this stage in doing the finished art that I always wish I was somewhere else, doing something else entirely, and just not having to worry about getting the artwork finished!   You would think that the easiest thing to do would be to JUST DO IT AND GET IT DONE!   

Here’s the layout I did last night.  The layouts are always rough and the “magic” happens when I transfer the layout onto the  watercolour paper and start painting.

After getting the “idea” down on paper in a sketch/layout I then can more easily make the decisions as to what needs to be changed, eliminated, or added.  Right now two of the background trees look like horns grown out of the roof of the work shed.  I think they’ll have to be deleted in the finished art.

And, of course, as I work on the finished pictures the text of the story often changes.   When I see that the illustrations more clearly (and usually more strongly) conveys what I’m trying to do to move the story along I see where words can be cut altogether.  In other instances, I see where I may need to add a line in order to make the shift to another scene (from indoors to outdoors, for example) more logical.   

For me the words and pictures work “hand-in-glove”.   They cannot be separated.

Tonight I’ll plunge in and will do the finished painting of this layout.  If it comes out good I’ll post a photo here.