I love Folktale Week as it celebrates folklores, myths and fairytales and that’s anything with a magical story vibe is my favourite kind of illustration. Since I get asked a lot about my illustration process, I thought I’ll share a detailed one for my pieces done during Folktale Week 2021. It’s a long one (with lots of images) - hope you find it helpful. Leave a comment if you have any questions or thoughts to share.

STEP 1: Goal Setting

Before we dive into the art side, I wanted to mention briefly why I like to set goals even for self-directed, non-client work. By having solid goals for your illustration projects, you get focused on creating strong work that aligns with your own art/career goals, and less on the popularity of your work on social media. For the 2021 challenge, I started with the following 3 goals:

Revisit a story I idea I had 18 months ago about a little girl and her imaginary friend (a flying white tiger) and develop it further beyond just the characters.
Build a series of illustrations for the same story to demonstrate to art directors my ability to develop illustrations in a picture book project.
Work on improving my composition skills of scenes with bigger depths that do not feature the character prominently.

STEP 2: Idea Generation & Character Design

More than a year ago, I had an idea of a character named Luna who had an imaginary friend who is a flying white tiger called Rainbow. I had a really basic idea of a story but it wasn’t really developed so I decided to revisit it. This was the old illustration of the characters:

As you’ll probably notice from her outfit (cardigan, jeans, trainers) in this old drawing, Luna was set in the real world. When I revisited it this time, I decided to make the setting completely imaginary so her outfit and environment could be more magical.

The prompts for 2021 were Moon, Dream, Awakening, Feast, Bird, River and Sky.

Based on these, I created a loose narrative of Luna waking up from a dream and meeting her imaginary friend who turned out to be real and they set off flying around on adventures together. I renamed the tiger to Nova to fit with the celestial vibe I was going for.

Usually, I would spend a lot more time developing the character designs (including character turnarounds) but as I was doing this in a very short timeframe, I only did rough sketches of the idea of how I wanted the characters to look.

STEP 3: Research

Being very analytical, I love doing research and can spend hours doing this but to prevent getting into a rabbit hole this time around, I focused my research on getting drawing references such as a side profile of a tiger, celestial night skies, etc as well as colour vibes that inspired me.

Stylistically, I like the way I approached the night sky on a previous illustration I did for the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival in September so I included it in my reference mood board as a reminder.

Note: My research mood boards are usually far messier than below but I’ve tidied it up here so it doesn’t look completely confusing.

STEP 4: ROUGH SKETCHES

The art part begins! These are the rough sketches I decided upon for all the prompts.

Based on my goals (2&3), I knew that I have to show a mix of different illustrations here - spots/vignettes, single page and double-page scenes - so I made sure I had a selection in my sketches. Also, I wanted some of the scenes to have a bigger depth where the character isn’t that prominent so I made sure at least 2 of the pieces show this.

For each illustration, I came up with a few thumbnails - sometimes the first idea ends up being the best but it’s always worth coming up with a few options. For example, these are the thumbnails I did for the first illustration. Option D (last) was the one I chose ultimately.

STEP 5: CLEANER SKETCHES

Now that I have decided on the composition of each illustration, I refined them further to a cleaner sketch. Sometimes I do this step a few times until I achieve a really clean sketch but due to the short timeframe of Folktale Week, I only did them once to the level you see below. I will refine the details as needed when I’m colouring them instead of doing them now to save some time.

STEP 6: COLOUR THUMBNAILS

This is a really important step for me to ensure the colour palette is consistent across the different illustrations, and that there is enough contrast in the colour values of each illustration.

The words in my mind for the mood/vibe I was going for with this series was: celestial night, surreal, magic. On that basis, I came up with a palette of cool but vivid jewel tones like turquoise, bright pink and yellow with dark navy to balance out all the bright colours.

Here are the colour thumbnails of all 6 pieces together. The contrast looks okay generally but I made a mental note to ensure I increased the contrast between the values for the images 4 & 6 that were looking rather flat:

STEP 7: FINAL ART

Now that I know all the illustrations and colours are working in harmony, I start the process of doing the final art of each of the pieces.

Here are the final illustrations of all 6 pieces together. I ended up changing the pose of Luna in the cover image. I try not to change the compositions of my drawings so last minute but sometimes it just has to be done. The original sketch lacked personality so I introduced a bit more movement into her character.

NEXT STEPS

Although I was pleased with the outcome of this project, I strongly believe there’s always room for improvement and I always welcome constructive feedback. So I reviewed these with my agent at The Bright Agency who gave me suggestions to tweak some of the pieces to strengthen them. My agent has also encouraged me to refine and outline this into an actual book to pitch to publishers so that’s one of my big goals in the coming months.

I hope you’ve found this peek into my process for Folktale Week useful and that it’s encouraged you to join in next time the challenge comes around.

Leave a comment if you have any questions about my process or thoughts you’d like to share. :)

Illustration Process: Folktale Week 2021