Little Miss Muffet - Process

Whoo! Schools out for winter break! I'm gonna try to post some more of my drawings and stuff from this past semester, starting with this.

All this is for my final illustration project in Ani 112a. I just thought it might be interesting for some people to see the whole process we had to go through! So here we goooooooooo!

So, to start off the assignment was to illustrate our interpretation of one of these nursery rhymes. After some considering I decided to go with "Little Miss Muffet"

The next step was to do thumbnails just to get as many ideas out as I could. A minimum of 100.

After looking at all my ideas, I picked my top four to pitch to my class and professor for approval (the bottom left was the approved idea).

So next we were to create a minimum of 25 compositional thumbnails with very basic values. This was to help solidify the idea and composition of the piece.

From that I picked my top two and got some critique on the one that was approved.

After the compositional thumbnails, we were to seek out or take our own reference. Here is just some of the reference I used. Nothing was really exactly what I wanted for my image, so I had to do a lot of studying, mixing, and matching.

After gathering some reference we tackled a half sized drawing (4.5"x 6") in graphite. This went through some critique and was fixed up as was needed.

I then made photo copies of the half sized drawing and practiced various pen and ink techniques on top of those to practice for the final illustration (very useful for finding techniques that worked well and knowing which ones didn't work quite as well). Also, I looked a lot at Franklin Booth (an incredible pen and ink illustrator!) for inspiration.

After the studies we then moved on to make a full sized pencil drawing to try to finalize the values and composition of the piece.

We then transferred the full sized drawing onto another sheet of bristol board to have the layin for our final pen and ink illustration (which is not a forgiving medium!). Here's some shots I took throughout my working process on the final (I didn't think to take pics until a ways into the illustration, but I thought it might be fun to see the drawing grow):

This is the very last step before the finished piece. All I had to do was go in with just a tiny bit of white acrylic paint and clean up a few areas. But it's pretty much done! (you can see the full final in my next post)

Then I was curious what all the sheets of paper that I used would look like spread out, so here's most of it! Pretty much everything you've seen above plus quite a few sheets of extra technique practice before I brought it to the final:

Woooo! Really long post for a pretty long project! This project was a lot of fun and I feel like I learned a lot!

Good stuff!