The Illustrations

The illustration process went over a few workshop sessions. Before each session we "limbered up" through squiggle drawing. A random squiggle was drawn on the board, with our non-dominant hand. From the squiggle we had to create our drawings - letting go of our inhibitions and seeing what we could create. This got the creative juices flowing! We used this technique at every workshop which helped us to relax and certainly got the laughter flowing.

Professor Euko

The final image of Professor Euko was a collaboration between 2 students. We all really liked parts of each of the original designs and we voted to merge the two together. The main image was reused in different scenes with just changes to the position of arms and facial expressions!

"We drew Professor Euko! With a lot of care and effort it took us ages to come up with a final Euko ~ Nova and Maggie.

Bob the Dog

In the first stages of illustrating we all had a chance to try to draw the main characters. Some people did really well at this. We all had a look at the pictures and voted on the ones we preferred. Damian's drawing of a dog was voted the one we wanted to be Bob.

"I am the illustrator of the dog which I struggled to do at times because I normally only draw cars and utes in 3D, but I got the hang of drawing dogs in the end. ~ Damian

Th Princess Frog

Penny and Brenden drew the Princess Koala and the Princess Frog. They worked together blending their ideas. They made sure that they created a character that was funny and engaging.

The drawings were done in pencil and fine art liner. We kept the images black and white, then added colours and textures digitally from the art created by other students.

We were also able to delete parts of the images and correct things using Photoshop, thanks to Tina's fine skills!

The Princess Koala

Drawing the Characters

Working out how our characters would look, their style, their personalities, took a lot of collaboration and workshopping! We used information books from the library to get an idea of how real koalas and frogs looked: the shape of their faces, the position of legs and toes, mouths and eyes. We used this information as a basis for the creation of our characters.

For the characters we went through a series of steps to actually get our final characters. We all had a go at drawing koalas and frogs, using different styles of drawing. We then walked around the room and voted for the pictures we liked best. After a bit of discussion we decided on the character designs we all liked the best. We all had loads of fun making up koalas and frogs and it was a good way to find some great ideas.

Texture

We mixed water and paint together in a tub and blew bubbles. We then pushed the paper onto the bubbles. This made great splotchy patterns which were used throughout the book. We put salt on the wet paint to make it look better, the salt made star like shapes in the paint. We used straws to blow the paint around the paper, creating trails of colour. We found textures all around school to incorporate in our backgrounds, using pastels for rubbings.

Instead of redrawing entire characters for each page we used a basic form and changed certain body parts! Bob's legs were erased and redrawn at different angles. Facial expressions were changed by making simple changes to the eyes and mouths. Some of these changes were made by drawing them and some were done digitally.

Backgrounds

For the backgrounds we used multimedia to create some truly out-of-this-world patterns. We used a variety of paints, watercolours, pastels and pens. We used InDesign to manipulate the textures and backgrounds into parts of the finished illustrations. For example the dress of the "Princess Frog" was a water colour painting done using straws and gravity to create flowing lines of paint. This was then added into the character's outline as a dress.

Frogs

One exciting element of the book are the frogs! Everybody has a frog drawing in our book, hidden in all sorts of places. Not all of us could draw the main characters but we were all included by adding our creativity by drawing the frogs and other illustrations on the pages.

Matt shared his illustrating skills with us too. He did super quick drawings of students. Inspiring us all to have a go and use simple techniques.

Matt's drawing of Zeke was a hit!

We had a lot of fun experimenting and making a bit of a mess!

Report abuse