Exercise: History of Illustration Part 2

An illustration in the style of both artists

E.H. Shepard
To get a feel and idea of how Shepard illustrated I looked through a book that I had at home called The Pooh Story Book - ISBN 0-603-55012-6 - First published in Great Britain 1967 by Methuen & Co Ltd, reprinted 3 times. My Edition was published in 1991 by Dean in association with Methuen Children’s Books.

Sketches and drawings from sketchbook 1
To further get an understanding of his techniques I went about sketching some of the pages from the book above. I felt I captured both the character and the style rather well. The chair piglet is sat on is out of proportion.
I first drew part of an illustration from page 9 of the book of Piglet sat in his chair. Then Winnie the Pooh from page 26 and Eeyore from page 27 and finally Winnie Pooh from page 9.

Once I felt I had an idea of what needed doing I went about creating a scene of an old boot out on the grass and a small field mouse using the boot as a home. Small thumbnail sketches at the top of page marker 3, finished illustration below on page marker 3. I sketched out in pencil, outlined with pen and ink and then placed over light washes of watercolour. Overall it wasn’t too bad but I found re-creating your own piece in someone else’s style is pretty difficult, especially when copying someone that had perfected that style over the space 20-30+ years.

I used my reference sheet of Nico Marlet’s sketches and approached it in very much the same way as I did with shepard, basic pencil sketches to get the feel of the illustrations.
Page marker 4 having already sketched up my scene before on page marker 3 I went ahead and started sketching out potential designs. I had a lot of trouble with the perspective and angles so I took a sheet of copy paper and experimented with a sphere and cone to try and work out some sort of dimension to the drawings (page marker 5 of learning log).

After studying his work more and more I started seeing basic shapes and forms within his characters making it much more logical to process the construction, the crocodile at the top left of page marker 4 is a simple triangle carved and expanded in various places to make the crocodile. Taking this further I drew a very basic mouse sketch from a few images on google (far right of page) and built my character from that shape. I also experimented with some colouring and outlining but I don’t own any of the material Nico Marlet uses.
Page marker 6 was my version of the mouse coming out the boot in the style of Marlet. Not owning the right materials I went about adding some pastel colours over the top to try and create a similar colour effect.