This is a piece which spent a long time coming! I came up with the concept of this illustration lying in bed at night, months before I even started the final. But all I knew at that point was I wanted a little girl and a crocodile to be interacting in some way… so a pretty vague idea, but an idea I was excited about nevertheless! I’ve been working on my children’s illustration portfolio for the past few months, but there was something missing, a piece which had characters as the main focal point. This is something I usually shy away from as I’ve always found it difficult to draw characters any bigger than a few inches, often opting to make the characters tiny inside a big detailed environment. Not any more I say! This time I would really push my self to make characters which were interesting enough to fill the whole piece.
So, I started like I start most of my big pieces these days, with an excessive amount of planning, firstly tackling the small issue of having no idea how to draw a crocodile. After a few failed attempts I started to get some pretty good looking crocodile designs. My aim was to exaggerate their shapes and fill them with as much texture as possible to bring out there scaly bumpy skin.
With the success of my crocs, I moved on to thumbnails. I went in to this with the vision of two things: I wanted the crocodile to frame the outer edge, and there should be a huge size difference between the characters. After a lot of rough sketches I landed on this as my favourite composition, as I loved the silly position of the croc and the fun interaction between the characters. Great, I have it all figured out… except theres no real story. I wanted there to be a reason for this interaction, why is this little girl lying on a crocodiles tail? After a bit of brain storming the idea hit me. What if they’re hiding under her bed sheets, and if they’re under the covers, should there be a light source? Thats it! A disco ball - it’s a crocodile disco!
After having my epiphany I moved on to planning out the colours on photoshop. This piece went through many variations as I attempted to draw what I thought the underside of a patch work quilt would look like, and eventually I settled on this. With my colours figured out it was time to move onto painting my paper.
When painting my papers I had one main focus, texture texture texture! I splattered, scraped, stamped, sponged and stippled my way through sheet after sheet, using any technique I could think of to create scaly looking marks.
Finally, after all that preparation, it was time to start the final artwork. I began with the crocodile, blocking out the main shapes and textures. This is always the slowest part of the process, as I move piece after piece until I find the perfect formation. I often compare collaging to building a jigsaw, but if there was an endless amount of pieces and you have no idea what the finished jigsaw will look like. This part can feel really defeating at times, as the sea of paper refuses to cooperate and slot together nicely, but you just have to give in to the process and trust in your skills. Eventually, as slow as it might be, the more you move paper around, the clearer the image becomes and decisions start being made. ‘Yes I think I will stick this piece of paper down!’
Once I had started to commit to my shapes and glue them down a crocodile began to form, and momentum picked up. It was starting to come together.
With my base shapes in place, I started to go in with the details which is the fun part; gluing on squares and bumps, and the best bit, using my crayons to draw on even more texture!
Then I moved on to painting the little girl. I opted to paint her as opposed to collage as I wanted to keep her loose, making sure to be quick with my marks and purposely messy. To stay loose, I painted multiple versions of the girl to take the pressure off making something perfect.
So I have my finished characters, now I just have to edit them together. This step wasn’t as simple as it sounds. I spent many days buried under photoshop layers, as I tried to digitally piece together the background from scans of my painted textures, and merge everything together in a way which looked believable. Well, as believable as a crocodile holding a disco ball can be.
This is what my background layer looks like. Without the characters on top to cover up the gaps, this looks like a hot mess, but it gives you an idea about how it was made.
This is it once the characters have been added. It’s starting to come together, but theres no lighting and most importantly, no disco ball.
Finally, this is the finished piece, and I love it! I’ve been pushing myself outside of my comfort zone more and more these days, and while it has its fair share of challenges, the results make it all worth it. I think this is a very worthy addition to my children’s illustration portfolio and maybe you’ll be seeing more of these characters to come!
Thanks for reading
Emily :)