My current project “Little Red Hoody” is slowly taking form. I wanted to illustrate a short story and chose “Little Red Riding Hood” as it’s out of copyright and I could play with it a little, updating it with a modern twist, hence “Hoody” not “Riding Hood”. I needed also to get my style down; I’ve been told every illustrator needs one, but I have four! (Realistic, cartoony/doodley, reportage and photo manipulation with acrylic.)
I started by having a quick look at what other illustrators had done with the fairy tale and found some great artwork…
Little Red Riding Hood by Annie Rodrigue
From Threadless
Little Red Riding Hood by Amanda Gray
Little Red Riding Hood by Nelson Evergreen
Little Red Riding Hood by Leisha-Marie Riddel
I love what other artists have done with the genre! I decided I just wanted to stick to the same story, but set it in the present day. So I took lots of photos of my little sister during a walk through the countryside and wooded areas near to my home, then I manipulated them in Photoshop to heighten the colours and merge two together if I wanted more trees etc.
I hope you can’t quite tell that each of these photos is actually two different ones put together. I love colour so I have heightened and changed all the colours, but I think the photos look much better like this, you want the images to pop out at you and not look like some dreary British afternoon with the sun going in! I love how I can make the shadows and darker wooded areas look almost purple, I’ve always found the colour works well in paintings.
After printing out the altered photos I’ve then painted directly onto them to add the characters into the “setting” as it were…
Unfortunately some of the photos haven’t come out as well as the first few as the scanner was on the wrong setting, but they can be scanned in again.
I’ve decided that as they’re photos I’m going to create like a family photo album in order to tell the story; thus I won’t be making an ordinary storybook where the whole page will be taken up by the picture, with the text printed over the top. Each page will have a couple of photos face up and the text will appear next to them on what appears to be the back side of the photos from the previous page…
The text will appear to be handwritten in blue ink and hopefully I can get it all done in time!
