I think inking is my favourite part of drawing. With the pencil sketch, drawing feels tentative and scruffy, and I'm just trying to work out how everything might fit in. But inking is where I can relax a bit and enjoy the beauty of lines and shapes, and then sometimes come up with funny little extra details. Originally I was thinking we might put a dedication up in that left-hand corner, so I left it blank in this inked version. And kind of like the clean, crisp look of that image. But we have more room, so a dedication can go on another page, and I thought kids would actually appreciate having a few more things to look at in that corner. Ask a designer, and they might say, no, leave the space clean, but ask a kid if they would rather see white space or TWO MORE SNAKES, and I think you know the answer.
And then I scanned the inked version and put in some tone in Photoshop. We'll get to have one colour (blue) in the luxury hardback version (grey in the paperback), but that lets us have different intensities of blue. I think I'll have just two variations, a light blue and a darker blue.
Moving on, here are Oliver's parents! Mr and Mrs Crisp. They're sitting in the studio, drying, on my light box, and I'll scan them in a moment. You can see a pencilled version of them in my first post about Seawigs
I hope you enjoy these updates! Fingers crossed that I'll get lots done today and be able to post more pictures soon.