Children's Book Illustration class

These are some illustrations from a class I'm taking now. I'm afraid I don't have the story in front of me, so this is just a synopsis from memory. Anyway, this was our first assignment, character design. We were given three short stories to choose from (short equals... about two hundred words is my guess). I chose the one called "Why Cats Hate Mice." Basically, the dogs and cats have been fighting for over a thousand years. The cat king decides that he's sick of the fighting, so he proposes that the dogs and cats should make peace. So they draw up a peace treaty, which the cat scratches to sign, and the dog "makes his mark in the manner of dogs," you do the math, and so they're at peace. Then a dog who has been traveling comes back and says, "Hey cat, growl!" and the cat he threatens says, "Whoa dude, we're all at peace now, didn't you know?" and the dog says, "As if," and the cat says, "No really," and takes him to the attic to show him the treaty that they signed. They hid it in a bag of oats. I don't know why exactly. Except that when he opens the bag of oats, he finds the treaty has been chewed by mice and it's all in pieces, and the dog says, "What a liar! Woof!" and then they're at war again. So dogs hate cats because they think cats are liars, and cats hate mice because they ruined their peace treaty.

You may guess that I took some creative liberties with the specifics of the story just then. Heh. Anyway, we were to design two characters from the story, and the most interesting to me were the cat king/dog king. Here is the first page from my sketchbook, to figure out the details of the cat king. I don't know why I segregated them like that, it just made sense to me. These are from the week of October 4th - 11th.




Does he wear clothes, or doesn't he? Should he stand upright, or shouldn't he? Sort of realistic, sort of not? These are things I was thinking about as I did them.



I really liked the stripey fat cat in these second ones (on the right side of the page) but in the end decided that he was a bit too sweet and sort of huggable to be the king. Vince suggested that he might be more like the cat who meets up with the dog at the end of the story - you know, he hasn't been at war for awhile, he's pretty happy and just relaxing. I can see that, so if I were actually illustrating this it'd be a definite possibility.

More:



Ideas for the dog king. Vince teased me that the German shepherd at the top was kind of like the George W. Bush of dog kings, like, "Hey - pull my paw! hyuk hyuk." It was very funny, but sort of turned me off him, though I like his tattered cloak. As you'll see from the next ones, I was ultimately won over by another breed of dog for the king. It's funny, but I needed fewer pages and ideas to find the dog king, I think because dog breeds tend to be fairly distinctive. I'm sure cat breeds can be, too, I just don't know very much about them.



This is a bonus page, as it has not just cats but ALSO dogs. I like the cat king on the litter. Get it? Ahaha. I kill me.



Finally, and without further ado, dog king and cat king. I decided to go with the younger "radical ideas" cat king as opposed to the grizzled veteran. I love the dog king and his little bone ornaments, and the cat king's fish necklace. Haha. Is it okay to laugh at your own ideas? I hope so, because I totally do. So there you go, those were my final designs, the next assignment was to use them to develop a scene, which I will share later even though it definitely needs some tweaking.