Mum's the Word Progressing.

I know I've posted the illustration above before, and that it's on my website, but I thought I'd post it up again in context. This was a sample piece I did for 'Mum's the Word' before we had made the decision for the wolves to become dogs and the wildlands to become homely environments. Goodbye, little wolfies, hello awesome doggies.

This was one of the first 'samples' I did to get to work on the book, 'Mum's the Word', even before the designs in teh previous posts. And you can really tell it's one of the first samples. I mean...whoa. This is...different...to how the final book came out. I was using lots of ink and heavy line here, but we slowly adapted the look of the book to be of soft pencil, for that extra-sensitive touch. Not that I dislike it: it's just I haven't seen it for a long time and had forgotten how different the general look of this sample is to the finished project...it's inevitable, that the style will develop and grow during a project, but still, it's usally a shock when you look back over the progression. I still love using an energetic ink-line, but I realised during this process that it has its place, and perhaps my 'younger' children's book is not that place. You can definitely still see the playfulness and the mega-cutie-power that carried on through to the final book though. Max was growing wings! Or balloons. Do dogs grow balloons? I forget.

Four days until the book is released!!