Language Book

The outline for the language book project was to create a 24page book, with a minimum of 12 illustrations. The book had to be in a language that was foreign to us and the pictures had to clearly depict the type. I decided to do a book in German using the illustration style used to make Dora the Explorer. Instead of Dora and Boots the main characters are Klara ad Klaus, a German girl and her pet rabbit. In their adventure they would wake up on a sunny morning and go to the zoo and see different kinds of animals.
At the beginning it was smooth sailing, I sketched out 12 drawings, this is an example:

The problems began to occur when I brought the sketch into the computer. Vectoring the sketch made it look flat and lifeless.

To fix this problem I decided to chose a colour palette and to first draw the illustrations in pen and ink, scan it in then colour it in Photoshop.

 This was getting more towards what I wanted my illustrations to look like but I still wasn't happy with the final result. The colours were too muddy and the style started to look less like Dora the Explorer with the outlines in ink. From this I decided to change the style completely. With the help of a classmate I came across a designer, Ty Wilkins who's style was very simplified using basic shapes and minimal colours. This is an example of his work:

I then went on to colourlovers.com and found a colour palette. I added and changed a few colours and decided on a palette of white, blue, dark brown and two yellowy mustard colours. Using basic shapes, circles, squares, triangles ect. I created simplified scenes and animals. These are some examples of the finished illustrations: