As I’ve been trying to learn more about kids’ books, I’ve noticed I’m especially drawn to illustrated non-fiction books. Facts! Fun! What a good combo.
Last month, I finished a 3-month long course about creating characters for books and toys, run by Make Art That Sells. Each month we were tasked with creating characters based off a text written by our instructor Zoë Tucker, then using those same characters for a toy-related assignment given by our instructor Riley Wilkinson.
In the end, my favourite month of assignments revolved around a non-fiction text about ostriches. Here’s a look into my work for these two assignments!
Assignment #1
Creating illustrations based off a non-fiction text.
Step 1: Read and annotate
I already had so many ideas running through my head when I read through the assignment text for the first time. Ostriches kicking, dancing, watching other birds fly because it can’t. I annotated the text with these ideas.
Step 2: Thumbnails
I drew thumbnails on my iPad for spreads based on different snippets of text that stood out to me as particularly fun. I would have happily drawn all of them, but I chose one out of the bunch to focus on for the purposes of the class — a breakdancing ostrich wooing potential partners.
Step 3: Figure out how to draw ostriches
I then collected a bunch of reference images and switched to drawing with the ol’ pencil and paper (I get too finicky with the iPad).
When drawing from reference, I tend to draw in a completely different way than drawing something from my imagination, often focusing too much on details instead of capturing things in my own “style”. Maybe this is normal, but I don’t like it. I found having lots of references helped me avoid this trap. Instead of focusing on any one image, I had to try to distill everything I saw into the Essence of Ostrich™️.
I usually like to use dots for eyes in my drawings and I very quickly saw that that wasn’t gonna work here.
Deciding on big cartoony eyes, I started playing around with eyelids and lashes too. I thought this could work well for a breakdancing ostrich character who is presumably cool.
I drew ostrich faces over and over and over, trying out different beak shapes, levels of eyelid closure, and adding a little tuft of hair. Among the crowd of faces, there is one that reminds me of Jar Jar Binks. And there’s another that made me feel like I was onto something.
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I kept drawing faces, trying to figure out what worked well and what didn’t with the drawing I starred. The eyes still didn’t feel ostrichy enough. My eureka moment was trying circular eyes farther apart, rather than oval eyes sorta close together. I was closer to capturing that Essence, and the personality of the ostrich I wanted — more dorky than cool and aloof, I decided.
Step 4: Figure out how to draw a breakdancing ostrich
With a better idea of how I wanted to draw the face, I drew the character’s full body and clothes. The tricky part here was figuring out how ostrich legs work, and how to map them onto a breakdancing move.
Ostriches’ legs look like they bend backwards compared to human legs. What looks like their backward knees are actually their ankle joints. I kept finding myself trying to draw them like human legs because they would almost look broken when I drew them bending the anatomically correct way. I settled on a combination of leg ankles that broke my brain the least.
Step 5: Draw the rest
From there, I switched between sketching, inking, and colouring in Procreate on my iPad and drawing in a sketchbook, particularly for figuring out how I wanted to draw a hippo and a crocodile. Lastly, I cleaned up some stuff in Affinity Photo like text and alignment.
Tada!
Here’s what I ended up with.
Assignment #2
Creating a seek and find game/toy, building off the same characters.
I’ve wanted to make a seek and find illustration for a while, so this assignment was a great motivator to actually give it a shot.
By now, I had a better idea of how I wanted my characters to look, especially after drawing so many ostriches. I’d also defined most of my colours and brushes in the previous assignment, so the process for this illustration was a lot more linear.
I’ll spare you from reading more words about my process, and let these images speak for themselves.
Tada!
As always, thanks for reading!
From me and my ostrich friends.
Kudos to you for figuring out how to successfully draw a breakdancing ostrich! My brain just broke thinking about it 😅