Final brief - process

I've chosen the the story Erl-king from the book The Bloody Chamber. One of the factors for this choice was the aesthetic part of the story. I felt like it had a good illustration potential.

I started with just some quick sketches of the elements I wanted to incorporate, like bird cages, leaves, I tried to think of how the Erl-king's house would look like. At this point I wasn't exactly sure what the final pieces would be so I was just sketching what came to my mind.

I looked at some pictures of birdcages to get a variety of shapes and types.

I knew I wanted birdcages to be the main element in at least one illustration so painted some, scanned them and traced them in illustrator.

I've also decided to design the Erl-King. I wanted to make him slightly inhuman, but not too much. I thought maybe his eyes could be inverse version of human eyes - light in the center and dark around it.

I redrew the design digitally and I think this one turned out better. I thought since he is basically like a spirit of the forest, his clothes should reflect that. I've also decided to give him a pan flute instead of regular pipe because of its connection to the Greek god of the wilds, nature and rustic music.

For at least one illustration I was going to need some birds. I didn't want just some random non-specific birds so I used some pretty common european birds as reference.

skylark

bullfinch

blackbird

goldcrest

kingfisher

wagtail

(I apologise if I got the names wrong, but I've learned what they're called in english specifically for this brief)

Ink outlines of birds and the title:

I've decided to make some brushes.

I played around with the brush presets and these are the results. I like how they turned out and I've already found use for some of them.

I've ended up using the 3. and 4. a lot. 3 for shading because it has a slight, barely noticeable texture that I like and 4 for the plants in the front of the picture and cage shading on the cover.

Before I started actually working on the illustrations I took pictures of some nature textures I thought might be useful