Chapter book Line drawings / Black and white Drawings

Final artwork for my first chapter book is underway! For this project, as usual, I started with some small thumbnail sketches of each illustration concept.

Then I chose one of the simplest and favorites to try out some different finished results. Since I've never done finished black and white chapter book illustrations before, I needed to see what style looked the best. I looked at lots of line drawings from other artists to get a feel for what others are doing. I could  go to a museum or pet store to take a picture of a box turtle and then copy the picture detail for detail, with a beautifully rendered pencil drawing, with all levels of shading and value, but that's not what we were going for with this particular project. I hoped to have an end result that would be a mix of realistic and yet have a spark of life and character. Some of the artwork I was looking at was perfectly rendered linework but it was all very even lines with no defferentiation in width adn nothing to help the eye defferntiate between forms in the image. I tried a few things and the client and her family chose the one that works best for the kindle and looks best overall ( Ink line, shaded in ink). I also experimented with digital linework on Inkscape and Illustrator but after a few hours of frustration I realized it would take too much time to get that to look beter than my hand drawn stuff.

Then I went ahead and drew all of the images as line drawings on heavy duty paper and scanned them in. This would allow me at the very least to print them off later in case I made a mistake on the first version.

Then I just went to town with the ink trying to have a variety of values.  

I've got four more of these small spot illustrations to go and about five full page illustrations and one color cover illustration for this book. The working title is "Samantha and the Box Turtle" and will be available on amazon for the kindle and other e-readers sometime this year.