Book Illustrations, Part Five

At this point, I've created my first character, Jeweley, and Jem was hot on her heels.  Knowing that I was going to be painting them over and over, I laid out a page of color notes to eliminate any guesswork. Each time I painted a character, I referred to these notes to make sure I didn't use the wrong color - yikes!

Jeweley ended up being blues and violets - Bombay Violet and Rowney Blue to be specific!  Many of the colors I chose for them were inspired by the books I paged through of jewels.

Below you will find Jem in all his glory.  At this point, we'd hammered out his two body colors, Bombay Turquoise and FW's Emerald Green, but I hadn't hit yet upon his clothing colors.  The orange shirt wasn't working, and he ended up with a white shirt, to which I added blue shadows.

Here I've got his face, hair and skin pretty dark.  In the final book illustrations, I lightened them up quite a bit.  Same as his sister, his legs and arms are faceted, to look like jewels.


So... two out of five characters are now developed!  It was time at this point to paint the first page of the story, Jeweley and Jem looking into their home through the window, wondering what Mom's up to. :)