Movie Mania strikes
Movie Mania is the title of a play for children I recently illustrated for an Australian publisher. The play is based around an African American family. A series of funny events unfold, involving a camera, a crazy cat and a boy. Movie mania strikes!
Movie Mania strikes: For this book I decided to experiment with my watercolour technique a bit. I used a similar way of painting that I had used for my boy riding a dragon. So I worked quite a lot in wet-in-wet using a smooth watercolour paper, so I could use a nib pen and ink. This avoids the nib catching on the texture of the watercolour paper and splatting the ink where you don’t want it.
This technique uses a lot of water and so I find it easier to stretch the paper first, so that I can control what I am doing far easier and have a flat and manageable piece of artwork to scan at the end. Everyone works differently, Quentin Blake and my friend Peter Kavanagh both work on un-stretched paper, which is great for them, but that just doesn’t suit me.
Today I thought I’d share a visual and finished artwork with you…
This visual is the revised drawing. The original didn’t have a foot appearing in it at the bottom, which I am still unhappy about. The publishers wanted me to add a foot, but at the angle the camera this would be physically impossible. You would not see the holder of the camera’s foot, unless they were goose-stepping or performing some sort of weird gymnastics. Sometimes you have to bite your tongue and just do something even when you know it’s wrong!
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