How to Draw Robots

Robots have been filling out Christmas stockings since Santa made his first ride, so as the festive season draws near lets connect the circuits and open the lid on the mechanics of drawing our metal friends. And who better to lay down the nuts and bolts than robot supremo Mike Brownlow. Don't touch that dial!



I love robots. Robots have figured prominently in science fiction for a long time, and were a vivid part of my childhood.

I had robot toys and read robot comics. 

Films like The Day the Earth Stood Still, West World, Metropolis and Forbidden Planet all left their mark on me. 

So it’s little wonder that I’ve drawn and painted loads of the things over the years, little and large. 

 
When I came up with the idea for Little Robots back in the late ‘90s, it was partly because robots had never, to my knowledge, been featured as the heroes of children’s picture books, let alone a TV series. I felt as though I had a blank canvas to play with. 

The robots I finally decided on were a mixed bunch – short and tall, round and skinny, loud and shy, fast and slow. 

And that’s the joy of it. Robots, frankly, can be anything you want them to be – as complicated as the Terminator, or as simple as Tiny. 

If you take the simple approach, they can be easy to draw because you need only work with the most basic of shapes. Bodies can be boxes. Arms and legs don’t have to be complicated things with joints and muscles, they can be metal tubes, like those of Bender in Futurama. Robots can have two legs or three or more; they can have wheels or tracks or jets to fly with. Their hands can be simple pincers or suckers like those of the Daleks. Their faces need consist of nothing more than circles, triangles and rectangles. Stick a few rivets on the body and you’re done.

But if you want to try something more complicated, I’ll point out a few problems I remember encountering when I was drawing my characters in Little Robots. They might serve as handy do's and don'ts. I wanted them to look properly 3-dimensional and work from all angles, partly because I had a secret hope that one day they’d make it to the TV screen as animated characters. I also wanted a grungy, mechanical look to my robots, as if they’d ‘grown’ out of a junkyard, or been re-discovered in a Victorian inventor’s old laboratory, rather than having a shiny, hi-tech appearance, so these are some of the things I thought about…

• Faces. If you’re dealing with small children you’ll have to invest your robot with some personality. Immobile and expressionless robot faces like those of the Cybermen (for me, always far scarier than the Daleks!), are really creepy. Logically, robot faces won’t naturally have any mobility, as they’ll be made of metal, so you’ll have to cheat like crazy to enable them to show emotion. I tried to think of a robot face as being made up of cogs, hinges and widgets that moved about in a mechanical way. It was easier to imagine them being animated that way. Alternatively, I’ve created robot faces made from a TV screen before now, so that a variety of expressions could be shown in a plausible way.

• Think of other mechanical devices that might be used on your robot to emphasis its metallic nature – TV dishes instead of ears; telescopes for eyes; springs and shock absorbers for the arms and legs; rivets and screws; pressure gauges and flashing lights.

• Creating your robot’s world. A good exercise is to go into a typical garden shed, DIY  toolbox or an ordinary kitchen for that matter, look at all the gadgets you can see and, (with the appropriate permission!) try assembling some of the objects into a mechanical creature.
Similarly, if you want to create an unusual, mechanistic environment, try taking old pots, pans, cans, perfume bottles, widgets and doo-hickys from your cupboards, and assemble them into something resembling a townscape.  Turn some of the bits and bobs upside down or sideways, and you’ll find unusual shapes reveal themselves. Draw the shapes and embellish them until they become your own robo-town.

Reclamation yards and antiques fairs are other wonderful places to come across strange and unconsidered objects. Victorian mangles, old hoovers, spare parts from 1950’s cars, sci-fi memorabilia – there’s a world of inspiration waiting there for you!

• I wanted to give my robots a variety of finishes to make each stand out from the other so, for example, some had a shiny appearance, some had a rusty look. As an experiment, try drawing a rusty piece of metal, then a reflective piece of metal like a car bonnet. It’s a tough visual problem but you’ll learn a lot about observation. 

• At some point you’ll have to decide how your robot is going to move around. Some sort of logic, however warped, has to be applied, so if your robot has arms that hinge, try to consider the nature of the joints and whether they appear practical. What powers the limbs? How do they twist and turn? Consider the movement of the jaw, and the flex of the foot, and the way your robot collects information from the world. The best characters have a back story, and in this case that should include how they convincingly move through their world.

Finally, school visits. When I go into schools I’ll often do How-To-Draw sessions with the children, but I’ll also take various printed sheets, such as the two shown here, that can be photocopied for use in class after I’ve given my talks. 

 It’s an easy way for teachers to do follow-up work with the children. If they’re too young to do creative writing or drawing, many of them like to take these sheets and colour them in, cut them out and stick the bits together. I encourage them to use the sheets as a starting point, and to go on to make their own robots, which often results in some spectacular results! Why not try something similar?

Have fun!

-----------------------------------------------------

Mike Brownlow is both an illustrator and author of many books for children, including CBBC's Little Robots. His new book Ten Little Pirates  was illustrated by Simon Rickerty. Mike's clients include Orchard, Bloomsbury, OUP, Harper Collins, Pan Macmillan, Pearson, Lego....
Recently Mike was Words & Pictures' featured illustrator. He is an active member of SCBWI and lives in Somerset.

Photoshop Brushes Part 1

Photoshop is one of the cornerstones of digital art, so ubiquitous there can be few illustrators who've not experienced the software at some stage in their career. Paul Morton this week offers the first of two features on customising brushes in Photoshop to create unique textures. 

Anyone who has used Photoshop will know that it boasts some great illustration tools. Its basic set of brush tools allows you to airbrush very convincingly and if you care to dig a little deeper, you'll find the natural (and unnatural) media brushes that are provided in the package. With perseverance you can learn how to customise these tools and create your very own, resulting in virtually unlimited possibilities - such as the ability to paint with grass, cloak a creature in fur, paint foliage on a tree, airbrush wisps of smoke, snakeskin, glitter, barbed wire, etc etc. 

Take a look at the illustration that heads this article. Click to enlarge. Every mark you see on there has been created using a customised brush. I'm going to show you how to achieve this and I'll also give you the settings for some of those brushes, so that you can try them for yourselves. 

First let's check out the most basic of brushes and get a grasp of their functionality. There are hard edged and soft edged brushes, and a variety in between. Typically, pencils are hard edged with no anti aliasing (ie. no soft edges) 

(I find it useful to view my onscreen brush tip as 'normal size' or 'full size'. Then, as you're working, you see a ring indicating roughly the size of the tip you're dealing with. Much clearer than the standard cross-hair cursor. To do this, go to Photoshop preferences and choose 'Display and Cursors').

It's also useful at this stage to appreciate how important it is to use a graphics tablet and stylus such as Wacom, in order to master the natural look of each brushstroke. It's understandable for newcomers to be a little cautious at first, but try signing your signature on screen using a mouse. Then with a stylus. There's no contest. 

With the brush tool selected, go to Window/brushes (or F5) which opens the 'Brush Palette'. Let's choose, for example, a fairly large, hard edged brush. 

Picture 1 - shows our Hard Edged Brush stroked firstly with a mouse then with the tapered elegance created by using a stylus. 

 With the Brush Palette open it's here's where you can choose the size and style of brush from the drop down list. Make sure you take note of the mini palette called 'Brush Presets' as this is where all the brush alchemy takes place. 

 With 'Brush Tip Shape' selected, look at the bottom of the long palette and you'll see controls for brush spacing, brush size, softness and brush angle controls. To squidge the shape and angle of the brush (not terribly useful but you may as well know how) use the cross hair control. 

All the changes you make get a mini dynamically updated window at the base displaying your current brush stroke. 

Picture 2 - shows how the round brush has been squidged, more obviously apparent when painting in various directions. 

As you paint with any brush, Photoshop spits out a series of dots of 'paint' at regular intervals. Lots of frequently emitted dots equals a solid line of paint. But if you slow down and control the frequency of the dots you'll get...a dotted line. 

See Picture 3 Painting with regular dots at regular intervals is OK for regular graphic and decorative work, but if we're striving to get 'natural,' then we need to mix it up with a few random factors. Let's make our rows of squashed dots become random sizes. 

Picture 4 - shows how 'Shape Dynamics' gives precise control over the min and max size limits of our dots, with 'Size Jitter' mixing them around between. 

And rather than keep these random dots flowing in one continuous line lets disturb their flow. 

Picture 5 -shows how 'Scattering' allows the dots to fall either side of our continuous line and using blue and green as foreground and background colours, we can also randomise the colour of our dots by using 'Colour Dynamics'. 

All we've done here is ask for blue and green to alternate as each dot is painted (jitter at 100%) But if the jitter was set at 30% for example, we'd get various tones of blue through green as we 'sprayed' with colour. Additionally if we turned on 'Hue Jitter', we'd get complementary colours thrown into the mix. At its most extreme, we could paint with rainbow coloured dots. 

The total control over this randomness, which affects the scattering, the intensity, the direction, the opacity, the purity of colours and more, can all be further influenced by the pressure sensitivity of our stylus. As you draw on the tablet, a change of pressure can alter most of these effects, as can the initial direction that you begin to paint in. It's bewildering, but now that you've got so far you ought to have a grasp of the fundamentals. 


But who wants to paint with dots all the time? (latter day digital pointillists maybe) Because no matter how much we mix up these variations, our dots are still dots. But if we pick one of PS media brushes such as chalk, pastel, crayon, etc then it starts to look a whole lot more natural and very practical for 'real' illustration work. 

Let's choose one of the chalk and pastel brushes. At the bottom of my list of brushes I've adapted and customised one of PS pastel brushes and re-named it 'best new pastel'. Picture 6 - If we zoom in and inspect a single brush 'dab' (created with a single click of the mouse) instead of a dot, it looks like this… 

In the next article I'll show you how to create such a brush from scratch, but for now we'll experiment with my 'best new pastel'. As you can see in the brushstroke window, it's pretty useless until we start refining the control settings. 

Picture 7 - after a few minutes experimenting, that very same brush now looks fairly convincing as a soft chalky pastel and uses colours that interact with each other. 

Picture 8 - shows the settings I used to replicate the pastel effect of Picture 7 

 You'll notice that the control for 'Texture' is now also active. Via that Preset, there are 100s of possible textures to try out. The size of the texture along with its depth, plus subsequent pen pressure, can determine if the colours 'bleed' into the texture, sit on top of it or completely obliterate it. 

 Picture 9 - the final picture in part one of this feature shows our pastel brush laid over a few different textures of various sizes. The 'mesh-like' strokes top left are achieved by using 'Dual brush' controls which I'm not going to explain in this beginner article, but basically, it allows 2 brushes to mix and interact with each other. 

You should now be able to explore any brush and make some reasonably useful marks with them. Once you have experimented and found your perfect pastel, or emulated your favourite Karismacolour pencil, charcoal, ball-point pen, etc etc, don't be surprised that it's not in your brush palette next time you open up PS. If you don't SAVE your new brush, I'm afraid all the experimenting and refining has been for nothing. So it's crucial to regularly go to Brushes then, using the tiny right-facing arrow top right of the palette, you'll see a drop down list. From that list choose 'New brush preset' and name and save your new creation. 

Next time we'll create our own unique brushes and see how they can be, and have been, used in children's book illustration.

---

Paul Morton lives in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, from where he runs Hot Frog Graphics illustration and design studio.

Picture Book Basics - Pace, Drama, Action!

You've sharpened pencils, honed your story and are ready to begin sketching the pages of your dummy. How do you make your picture book stand out from others on the shelf? What ingredients can you add to the mix to lift your illustrations from the mundane to the sublime? In one word - Drama! 




Picture books communicate with both words and with pictures, one of the key ways to enhance illustration for children is an understanding of how to dramatise your artwork. This list is by no means comprehensive, but here are ten things to ponder.

1. Character

The way you depict body proportions and physical features can be developed to compliment the tone of the text, the setting and the mood of the story, resulting in a book that works visually on several levels. Sometimes a strong character alone can establish the narrative and tie the pages together. Expression and body language can emphasise emotional states and the connection between characters on a page. Think of details of dress and appearance as the credentials of the character, their properties or history. Do they interact with the surroundings? Characters may be the core of the story with the background sketched in, or they can appear as players in a landscape, intimately part of the world around them. Sub-characters can be great for secondary plots, little extra visual stories running alongside the main narrative. 

Margaret Bloy Graham illustration from No Roses for Harry (Harper Collins 1958).
Curved, stylised lines in the characters emphasise lively movement, perfect for a little dog.
Notice too the limited palette of colours - Harry the Dirty Dog was first published in
black and white, colour being touched in much later.

2. Scene Composition

Viewpoint, composition and the arrangement of space can powerfully enhance the message of an image. Be a film director, think of the scene as a stage or through a camera lens, consider how it would look as a panorama / from a high angle / low angle / close up / pan back. Each viewpoint creates a different dynamism, carries a different message. Consider compositional rhythms and focal points. What geometric shapes naturally appear in the image? Can these shapes be emphasised to create compositional structure for greater effect? Design the pictures so that you control how the viewer's eye wanders across the image. Where should the eye rest? think of the page corners - they are the gateways to the next page. 

A spread from Sam Lloyd's Mr Pusskins, showing how a reversed 'S' composition
leads the eye across the image and off the bottom right corner onto the next page. (© Orchard Books 2006)

  
 Sometimes you don’t need to show everything. Areas left blank on the page may resonate with areas of detail or give a sense of lightness to the page (quite apart from providing space for text!). In picture books, as in comics, you can have very minimal settings, provided the character and key story elements are clear. Tension is created from what you show, but also sometimes what you don’t show (what’s left to the imagination).

A classic Hergé illustration from the 1973 edition of  Tintin in America.
It's unnecessary to show the street below, the reader's imagination
fills in the vertigo! (© Castermann)

3. Narrative

As storytellers know, the journey is often more compelling than the resolution. Expectation is more powerful than delivery, the pursuit of something more satisfying than the final reward.

Think how you might be able to use details and elements in a picture to enrich that journey and push forward the narrative. Consider the time of day, the weather and other supplemental details. Think of how visual clues can add depth to the narrative - symbolism, surrealism, sub-plot details that may add an extra element to the story, or offer small visual comments that run parallel with it. Use these details to push the narrative forward to the next page or conversely introduce a contrast that forces a pause. When planning a series of spreads create waves and crescendos through the book - fast paced images, then sudden stops at showpiece spreads. Use small panels for detailed text and conversation, larger panels for tension build-up, full page bleed for shock and resolution. 

 

Two spreads from Neil Gaiman's The Wolves in the Walls by Dave McKean that show
the build-up of tension really well. Four frames of dialogue, followed by an intimate
close-up, full page image that pulls the reader into the apprehension of Lucy. Then turn the page,
and WHAM! the delivery - double page monster spread. (© Bloomsbury 2003)

4. Movement

 Movement is one of the best ways to establish narrative flow. Body language can show action, even if the character is not actually moving! Even small things like a hand gesture adds dynamism. If you’ve a completely static image then consider introducing a supplementary detail that might animate the scene - a bird in the sky, a cat walking across the background, a breeze that bends grass, lifts a few strands of hair or a curtain, even slight movement instils a sense of time and action.

Käthi Bhend illustration to A Tale of Two Brothers. What could have been a very
static image is turned into a riot of movement using falling leaves (© Nord-Süd 2006)

5. Lighting and Tone

Use light and shadow or pale vs strong colours to create mood, depth and dynamism. Sketch your image in black and white, establish tonal contrast. Look at the image through half-closed eyes, does it still resonate? Think of the picture as a theatre stage with spotlights and shadows. Characters can be highlighted by contrasting against darker shadows, which in turn can hide suggested detail and mysteries. Consider background, mid-ground and foreground, and how contrasting tones can add depth to the image. Mood is created by the weight of the air in your image. Shadows work on the imagination of the viewer, and can also create patterns, texture, and provide form for potent compositions.

A classic illustration by master of the mysterious Sidney Sime,
showing how light and shadow can create mood

6. Colour

Astute use of colour is a great way to create resonance in illustration. Think of complementary colours - search for combinations of colours that correlate together and anchor your image on those colours.

Try using a limited palette - choosing a narrow range of colours can produce dynamic and harmonious illustrations. If you have access to Photoshop or similar graphic software, try loading an illustration file and playing with the Hue/Saturation tool and the channels mixer to explore different colour scheme possibilities. Here's a useful colour chart that might be helpful in considering limited colour schemes, and also a very good article on choosing harmonious colour.

Limited palette used to spectacular effect by Michael Foreman
in Fairy Tales by Terry Jones (© Andersen Press 1981)

7. Texture

Texture can create depth and anchor characters and backgrounds to a believable world, as well as establishing mood and setting. Texture can be minimal, geometric, a few simple pen or brush strokes, or a heavily decorated, detailed image, or a rough tactile surface with lots of grainy ‘noise’. An image filled with a “wallpaper” of fine details and repeated patterns can add story elements unspoken in the text, populate a scene, make the world more of a reality and attractive to the eye. Pared down simplicity with broad expanses of empty space can establish a world with minimal expression, the reader fills in the blanks. Contrasting areas of localised texture with open or flat space can be dynamic. 

A colourful 'wallpaper' backdrop of texture by Lane Smith
from Pinocchio: The Boy (© Viking 2002)

8. Distortion

Twist elements of the image to enhance the flow and movement or emphasise a point. Distorted architecture and landscapes can suggest confusion or reinforce a compositional pattern. Distortion of figures can accentuate emotion and character. Also think of distorted colour. Skies do not necessarily have to be blue!

One of my favorite illustrators Errol le Cain using distortion to enhance the drama in Growltiger's Last Stand (© Faber & Faber 1986)

9. Design and layout

Experiment with graphic devices like having elements that break out of the frame as in the Käthi Bhend illustration above, combine frames with vignettes on the same spread, try mixing coloured images with black and white. Use the gutter as a compositional dividing line. Consider how the placing of type, it’s size and font affect the page design. Can type be used to enhance the dynamism of the image?
 

Clever trickery in Jason Chapman's Stan and Mabel, splitting one scene into 2 frames and a black and white. Notice how the eye follows the characters off the bottom right corner, urging the reader to turn to the next page. Again, a restricted palette adds to the drama. (© Templar 2010).

10. Emotion

Pathos, humour, fear, joy, excitement - this is what makes a powerful image. So identify what kind of sentiment you want to convey in the image and use all the elements - pose, setting, layout, details, mood and colour to work together towards this. Don't be afraid of melodrama and pathos. Building emotion into pictures is like a cook seasoning a dish, think of the aroma of the story, how do details in the image harmonise to convey the flavour? How does the colour, size and texture affect the way we perceive the world of the picture. If your illustration was food, how would it taste?

When you contemplate a story to illustrate for the first time, jot down the strongest first impressions on paper, immediately. The most dramatic place is your imagination, first impressions can be powerful. If you have an idea, sketch it quickly with a tiny thumbnail, capture the initial emotion, build details within the picture to enhance that first impression.  

Keeping with the food analogy, it's very easy to "over-egg" an illustration, throw in too many ingredients, to go too far. But used adroitly, adding some of these elements can enhance the storytelling experience, and reach silent communion with the reader through the dramatic power of the image! 

All images © the artists and publishers  

---

John Shelley is the Illustration Feature Editor of Words & Pictures and current Central East Network coordinator. 
He's illustrated over 40 books for children, many of them published in Japan where he lived for many years. His latest title The Stone Giant is out in Japan now, and will be released in English by Charlesbridge in the US in Spring 2014.   www.jshelley.com

Picture Book Basics - Sketches and Layout

In the second part of a series for illustrators starting out in Picture Books, Words & Pictures Illustration Editor John Shelley takes a look at planning images and layout.



So you have a story, and maybe some character studies and other sketched drawings. The next stage is to plan out the book and make a dummy. 

Storyboards

A common starting point for illustrators is to mark out a storyboard on a single sheet of paper, representing the whole book in small thumbnail sized squares. This allows the artist to pencil in the basic design of each page, plan how the story unfolds over the pages, divide up the text, see where the dramatic points are, and consider the rhythm of the images. As the sketches are thumbnail size and very simple it's an easy matter to rub out and redraw. Some illustrators draw tiny sketches or write the text on sticky notes which they can switch around the pages, though I find these have the annoying habit of curling up and falling off! 

storyboard for one of my recent books Jack and the Beanstalk, note the stickies!

Sketching and Layout

Having roughly planned the book it's time to make larger sketches for each page or spread. Personally I draw pencil roughs at A5 size per page (so A4 for a double page spread) scan these to make my dummy and later enlarge for the final artwork stage, but everyone will have their own method. 

All books (indeed all illustrators!) are different and the variety of style, composition and design is much too big a subject to summarise here. However here are a few commonly accepted pointers:

Boxed, Vignette, Spot and Full Bleed

(This may sound somewhat obvious, but it's worth clarifying!) 
In classically constructed books, a "boxed" illustration has straight defined edges, possibly with a border or frame, and sits within the confines of the page, so there is a gap between the image and the trim (i.e. the edge of the page). The illustration might be cropped from a loose-edged original, or painted to a ruled edge. As the border encloses the scene these are particularly suited to images with a considered, balanced composition. 

Boxed in illustration from Levi Pinfold's Greenaway award winning Black Dog. Notice how the dog's paw breaks the straight line to bring the illustration out of the page. Pinfold also includes a small Spot by the text. (© Templar Publishing)

Vignettes are illustrations with faded or loosely defined edges. The loose edges incorporate the white of the surrounding page to give the image space, lightness and draw the viewer into the scene.

Quentin Blake is a master of vignettes, the background is minimal but loose borders encourage the reader to mentally fill in the rest. (© Quentin Blake)

A spot illustration is a small free-floating motif, usually with no background. In picture books spots are particularly useful as visual addenda to the main narrative.
 
Bleed refers to part of an illustration that runs off the page edges, 'full bleed' means an image that entirely fills the page and is cropped by the trim. Nowadays very many picture books are full bleed throughout, however it's particularly effective when suddenly brought into play for the most dramatic and panoramic images. 

Axel Scheffler double page showing a full bleed illustration and two vignettes
(© Alison Green Books)

 

Big or Small?

A small image on a page surrounded by white space focuses on detail, so it might suggest quiet intimacy, or a key-hole view of a drama about to unfold. Some books begin with smaller images, then gradually open up to full bleed as the drama unfolds. The reverse can work too - big to small. A classic example of this approach is Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are, where the first and last illustrations are small, with very wide white margins, while the central fantasy spreads are full bleed.

Another use of small images is to break up a series of actions into details on a page. So for example, a piece of text might describe a character putting on a coat, then shoes, then tieing on a hat... one single image would suffice to cover all these actions, but by separating each into a series of vignettes or spots on a page a sense of time and motion can be introduced. 

sequential images from Emma Chichester-Clark
(© Emma Chichester-Clark)

 

Crescendos and Patterns

Picture books are a little like songs in that there is usually some kind of pattern or structure that the whole book follows, a regular rhythm flowing through, with choruses of loud, dynamic pages at key stages. It's equally true of both text and illustration. An image near the front of a book might be reflected with a similar design later to create a resonance. 

Two spreads from my in-the-pipeline book Stone Giant, the top image is page 06/07, the lower is page 26/27. I designed these two spreads with their sequences of square blocked in images to mirror each other, though they're at opposite ends of the book.

 

Page Turning

A key element of picture books is the need to move the narrative forward - the reader should always be encouraged to turn the page. This can be done by building tension and expectation in the image or text, ensuring plenty of movement from left to right, and drawing the reader's attention to the page corners. 

Rules are Made to be Broken!

Well, some of them perhaps. It's not necessary to mix image sizes in a book - regularity works well if the story has a strong rhythm. Full bleed images don't have to be panoramic. Within these basic patterns all kinds of fun can be had by breaking up these types and inventing ways to combine/contrast layouts. In fact this is what makes picture books so interesting. Go wild, be clever, be crazy! But remember, however mad the page layout, the narrative has to move forward, it has to be understandable as a book. 

The key thing is to follow instincts suggested by the text, do what the story conjures. 

challenging design and typography from Sarah Fanelli (© Phaidon Press)

Things to be careful of:
Remember the gutter (the book's hinge)! Avoid putting busy elements in the part of the book closest to the spine, they'll be lost in the final product. Be especially careful not to place key characters in the gutter! 

Consider the text - where will it lie? How much space will it require? Will it run over the illustration or be separate on the page? Likewise, leave a good gap between text and the gutter and page trim.

Page design is a big topic with myriad aspects. It's a good idea to peruse a lot of picture books and examine how other artists solve the challenges of page layout. There's also a lot of inspiring stuff on the Web if you dig around - for example Design of the Picture Book is a useful resource.

Dummies

Some illustrators make very elaborate dummies before submitting to publishers, but editors frequently say that a dummy that is too polished can actually make it difficult to consider the story. It's often recommended that artists sketch out spreads in simple black and white roughs, nothing too complicated, overlay the text, and draw just one or two finished images in colour to give an indication of the final look. 

One of my pencil roughs for Halloween Forest, from the first dummy. The finished image is here

Personally I sketch all my dummies in pencil on loose sheets, scan in to Photoshop, adjust, then lay out using InDesign, adding the text. I might spend a long time tweaking, changing around and so on before I'm happy with the result. Finally I'll save as a lightweight .pdf which I can then either email to my agent/art director or print out, clip into a plastic file and show as a physical dummy. 

---

John Shelley is the Illustration Feature Editor of Words & Pictures and current Central East Network coordinator. 
He's illustrated over 40 books for children, many of them published in Japan where he lived for many years. His next title The Stone Giant is scheduled for release by Komine Shoten in Tokyo this autumn, and Charlesbridge in the US in Spring 2014.   www.jshelley.com

Ink Splutterings

Anna Violet

Brush, knife or string? Which tool shall I use to make my mark?  The marks you make and choose are like your handwriting, they're unique to you. Much depends on the toolkit you use, as well as your materials. My own personal toolkit has evolved (and is evolving still) in response to my experiments with different tools and inks. Here are some of my findings.
Ink seems to have a fluid expressive life of its own. It floods, flows, runs, trail, seeps, creeps, splats, flicks, meanders, mottles, separates, puddles, scratches, mixes, patters, sprays, resists, drips, prints and swirls. Ink is bold, stubborn and wilful: it wants to go its own way. The tools you use can help you capture some of this attitude to your advantage. I like an image to look fresh, handmade and almost effortless, using just the right marks (yes, I'm on a long journey with a very large recycling bin!). So, for me, the best tool is the one that appears to do most of the work for me in the least self-conscious way. I am prepared to mix and match my application methods depending on what I want to show.

Different ink marks bring different connotations with them, depending on how they were made. Is the mark deliberate or accidental? Spontaneous or carefully measured? It is often the unintentional marks left on the floor that are the most interesting. What sort of energy do I use when I make them?  Do I flick from an old toothbrush, draw with string, blow through a straw or squirt the ink from a height? Do I add more water when it's drying or maybe try out some salt? Wet or dry paper?  Candlewax-resist or masking-tape resist? Do I tilt the paper to let the ink concentrate on the lower part or do I let the ink run down the paper in lines?  Do I mix and overlay different techniques, too? The diagram below is my take on the ink mark-making process. The mark depends on the tool I use, the materials, the sort of control I exert and the action I employ. Oh, and add in my ideas of what the character or scene should look like, too!

When I was at college I was encouraged to draw with unusual tools, such as plastic forks, string, straws, cardboard edges and sticks. They felt like impediments at first and I was out of my normal comfort zone but the results could be surprising and inspiring (as well as dreadful!). I took to certain tools and built up my own personal toolkit and way of working.

My Current Toolkit

• Big watercolour brushes hold lots of water and are great for loose fluid washes that flow, flood, creep, seep and bleed. 
• Housepaint bristle brush produces lovely stripes. 
• I get a swollen puddle edge to an area by drawing onto thick paper with a syringe filled with very dilute ink and waiting 24 hours for it to dry. 
• I also use my syringe to squirt out ink in splats onto paper on the floor. The eyedropper on the ink bottle squeezes out great dots, similar to a slip-trailer on ceramics. 
• My elder twig makes a jagged line as I scrape it across paper. Blowing ink through a straw leads to very organic plant-like growths. 
• I get my most surprising marks from a piece of string with a loop and knot at the end. I coax this gently over paper and it keeps flipping over and going another way, leaving trails of mysterious lines. 

So go on, try out some new tools! And please share any favourite or unusual tools in the comments section below.

ANSWERS: Which tools have made these marks?
1.Plastic fork dipped in ink
2 String dipped in ink
3 Ink blown through a straw + drawn with string
4 Ink wash (large round chinese watercolour brush) over masking fluid applied with stick
5 Brush mark, large bristle (housepaint) brush
6 Very dilute ink drawn with a syringe, puddle left to dry over 24 hrs
7 Ink print with cardboard edge
8  Ink flicked from a loaded large watercolour brush
9  Ink wash (large flat chinese hake watercolour brush) over torn masking tape resist

---

Anna Violet is a freelance author-illustrator based in Manchester. She won the Undiscovered Voices Tribute competition 2010 and was Featured Illustrator 2011. She illustrated a young readers book, How Anansi Got His Stories (Oxford University Press) in 2011. She blogs here.