I decided that I wanted to hand draw my book as I thought that this would make it interesting and I liked this style of illustrations. I had some illustrations online that were coloured using colouring pencils, not neatly, that I liked and thought that I could take inspiration from and use in my own designs.
Below is a pdf document of the drawings I did. I did originally have a drawing of the two watching TV together as an activity that they do together, and then one later where he plays by himself, but I didn’t particularly like the drawings and I found them very difficult to do and to colour right so I decided to take them out as I didn’t think they contributed anything to the story.
After all my drawings were completed and coloured, I scanned them and began erasing around the characters and the background in Photoshop so it was left with a clean, white background. I did this using a graphics tablet as it was much easier to be precise when erasing around the characters than with a mouse or trackpad. I felt that the drawings would stand out more against a plain white background so this is why I did that. I used the eraser with the soft edges to rub out around the shadows so it created a softer look and not such a harsh shadow. I also did this on the areas on ground that I had coloured in, for example in the angry drawing and the isolation one.
After erasing what needed to be rubbed out, I adjusted the levels of the colours so that they all matched. I made them slightly darker so that the colours stood out more and were so pale and faded as they were in the original scans.
