After turning in my final art files earlier this month, I've switched gears to working on the first Oxherd Boy picture book called BIG ENOUGH. The children's book is meant for children between ages 4-8 and is set as an origin story that follows Ah-Fu (the boy) as he takes on the fearsome task of bringing home the gigantic family ox for the first time.
Working on the webcomic and the adult book, though the volume of illustrations (over 100!) was huge, each one could essentially stand alone. So, I could jump around the book and paint as I pleased, starting and finishing one page before moving onto another. However, after working on it over the course of half a year, I realized that such daily practice led to some uneven results. The pages I painted first looked significantly less polished than the pages I did later on, leading to some inconsistency in the quality of the entire collection.
Though lack of consistency across so many pages is less noticeable in a collection like THE OXHERD BOY book, I realized that it wouldn't be so good for a 40-page picture book for children that had to support a narrative line. The art required some manner of coherence, and so I've had to switch up my painting to work a single painting step across all the pages before moving onto the next one.
As a result, I've been spending more time working my way through all 40 pages of line work, before beginning to add any shading or color. I hope this will provide a sense of continuity in the artwork across the book as I work through it over the next half a year! I'm really looking forward to diving further into the children's version of these characters and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
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