My Father’s Dragon
Children’s Book / Publishing / December, 2021
Art Direction: Paul Kepple
For this project we had to select a book of our choice to illustrate and redesign, I chose the book My Father’s Dragon, written by Ruth Stiles Gannett. The original children’s book illustrations were a bit outdated looking and looked a bit more scary than anything else. I thought I would bring my own personal style to bring more life into the book.
Process
I hand draw and ink all of my illustrations, scan them into photoshop and then proceed to finalize them with digital coloring. This project I wanted to experiment with other kinds of coloring styles that I haven’t used before. I wanted to capture the naturalistic elements of the environment depicted in the story so I used digital watercolor brushes and textures.
When all of the book’s spreads were finalized I intended for the book to be printed out onto watercolor paper to really accentuate the watercolor coloring of the illustrations. This resulted in each spread looking as though they were hand painted and inked onto the page.
