Faerie Locket Process

The drawing stage can be one of the best parts of a new project. My sketchbooks and flat file drawers are filled with drawings and sketches from each job that I do. There are too many drawings to fit comfortably on my website, (and it would take forever to update them all and I'm too lazy) so I hope to keep them updated here on my blog!

The following is typical of my process when starting a new illustration.

The cover for The Faerie Locket needed to feature Pip and the glowing locket. This was the composition selected from my thumbnail sketches.


I did a few rough sketches of ideas for the sitting pose. Each has a slightly different attitude. For the final drawing, I combined aspects of the sketches at the top and on the left.


This was what I thought would be the final drawing for the cover. Sometimes issues with a composition only come up after a drawing is more fully realized. As it turned out, the locket needed to be featured more prominently, and in this drawing, the locket is too far in the background. The top-down perspective of Pip sitting on a tree branch above the locket lying far below on the ground also calls into question the scale of the locket. If Pip were to fly down and stand next to the locket, it would be huge. To solve these problems, I roughed out some ideas for a new composition.


I didn't want to lose the drawing of Pip I had spent so much time on, and I liked the pose, so I looked for ways to make it work with different surroundings. The art director and I decided that we could get an effect very similar to the original drawing if Pip was sitting on a tree root rather than a branch.


And here is final drawing for the cover!