Butrón, Tales for kids with beards - a Prologue
"Butrón, cuentos para niños con barba" (Butrón, tales for kids with beards). Is live on appstore, for ipad, and you can download it here (I'm not sure if it has region restrictions or anything like it, so try it :D)
As this project finally launches, you will see here the process and details of the illustrations I did for the story's prologue. Download the app for the full-fledge content here and check the detailed illustrations here.
The process
I applied this same process in the four images of this post. In many ways, is an analogue-digital aplication of the fully analogue, mixed media process I used for this project. These are illustrations for a digital book and while not being full double pages like you would see in an illustrated book for children ("libro album infantil"), they were composed to "intervene" the two pages and interact with the structure of a dense text.
After the necessary sketching process, I do a pencil sketch in paper somewhat smaller than A2 (or somewhat bigger than A3, you get the idea) using the e-book's double-page ratio plus some extra on the sides as a margin (I use the ratio, not the size, because the size of the sketch is not exactly twice the size of the final product and I want to use as large an area of the paper as I can). The pencil sketch is very rough, but it serves as a base for the fully resolved drawing, which is done in one single pass of ink (in this case, I used drawing pens, not brushes or traditional pens) and then scanned and placed in a file. You can see three slightly different color comps. We went for #1
Using the "warm underpainting" concept I apply in my paintings, I do a first pass under the ink layer. The definitive color pass is gonna be over the inks, but deliberately leaving some parts uncovered.
The Illustrations - detailed
This is the end result of the process above. All the subsequent images are done in the same way.
The extension of the text required that the illustrations occupied one full and one partial page. However, I composed this one to use the middle area of the spread, thus not occupying any page in full.
Using the right page for the first one and the mid area for the second one, it was only natural to comopse the third illustration for a full left page and partial occupation of the right page.
The cover
For the cover we went for a single page illustration, since this wasn't done for print. It was mandatory to include the oficial typefaces and structure of the IP's logo.
Want to see more illustrations? go here for the full post on Butrón's app or check the links at the beggining of the post... Thanks again for scrolling this far down, by the way :D
