Working for children

I was working on a brief "working for children". I had to pick two animals and make images for two different age groups. 

I started with a wolf. Sketches first, then I made a self-portrait in acrylics with a composition that was meant to be about the grown up little red riding hood, and could be a book cover for a teenage audience.

some wolves in my sketchbook

I made lots of sketches of frogs towards 'working for children'.  Here is a selection

This is in my 6th A5 Sketchbook, I recently was inspired by the blog of the Illustrator: Kristi Anne Wakelin and started working on a A3 sketchbook, I feel grown up now!

a page from my A3 sketchbook

Here is my image based on my sketches, for a wrestling frog. This is in a style aimed at small children still learning to read. For that reason, I chose a large square format and lots of little things going on around the main character.

I had started with another idea for a frog: a frog on a bike, but I thought that to do the bike to a decent standard it would take me more time than I wanted to spend. Also, when I started researching frogs, my favourite was the mountain chicken frogs. It is BIG and I quite like the idea of a frog different from Kermit or others with tiny arms and legs, a muscular frog!

Goodbye frog on a bike!

At the same time, I was working in my sketchbook on another image. This is an interesting mish mash of my trying to carry on looking for images I like including letters, my sad little bear character who appeared in a previous project, and trying to progress with my pen and ink technique. I'm sure my technique can still improve but in my opinion this has been successful.