Illustration Breakdown: Drawing Superpower

Reading / analysing another illustrator’s breakdown of their work is a great exercise as there’s always something you can learn from it. So let’s do a detailed breakdown of this illustration I created for my art agency’s marketing campaign (for Picture Book art). I hope it gives you some useful insights!

BRIEF:

It was a fairly open brief with only these two constraints:

Theme: Child superhero (wearing a cape)
Age range / Market: 3-6 year olds / Picture Book

GOAL-SETTING:

I like to set goals for my art as it keeps me focused, and on a path of continuous improvement. For this piece, my goals were:

Create a more complex piece with more than 2 characters, without detracting from the main story. Drawing more than 2 characters is something I usually avoid so I wanted to challenge myself to let go of this fear!
Draw adult/grown-up characters if possible - again, this is something out of my comfort zone as I prefer to draw kids.
Incorporate movement into my illustration.

STORY IDEA & CONCEPT:

While coming up with the idea, I was very clear that I didn’t want to show the standard superhero attributes like super strength, speed, etc. Instead, I wanted something more whimsical and fun, and ideally connected to a creative activity.

I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of drawing things that come to life and this made me realise it was the perfect superpower to give my character. I then expanded on the idea that she is using her ability to spread joy and kindness around her.

To be able to show she’s sharing her power with others, I needed a setting that will naturally have different people of various ages with different activities happening, hence a public park.

GETTING INSPIRATION VIA OBSERVATION:

I knew I wanted a group of children besides my main character, some adults, some elderly people, and pets.

Although I had clarity about how my main character would help / spread joy to the grown-ups and pets in, I wasn’t sure yet what she would be drawing to entertain the other children.

So I went off for a walk to the nearby park to make some observations! I recommend you try to observe from life whenever possible as it could inspire some ideas.

At the park, I saw a man blowing bubbles for his 3 dogs and it was a very sweet and funny scene - not only were the dogs barking and jumping in joy, kids around the park were gravitating towards the scene and all running around the bubbles, dragging their poor parents with them! 🤪

So I incorporated that idea and made the focal point of my character drawing a bubble machine that sprayed bubbles that came alive off the paper.

INITIAL SKETCH:

At this stage I keep the sketch very loose and messy. All I’m focusing on is laying out where the characters are to determine the overall composition of the piece, and not worrying about having a pretty sketch.

REFINED SKETCH 1:

As I started to refine the sketch, I had to abandon the bubble idea because it was very difficult to make it obvious that the bubbles were coming off the page. There was also no standard bubble machine design that would clearly communicate what it signified if I drew that. So I revised the idea into a stream of glowing butterflies 🦋 for these reasons:

I could still have a lot of energy / movement with the butterflies flying about, just like the bubbles would have been floating around.
It was easier to demonstrate the “drawing coming alive” concept with half the butterfly wings as a sketch on paper, and the other half of the wings flapping out of the paper.

REFINED SKETCH 2:

My agent reviewed the previous sketch and asked for 2 changes:

Tighten the composition by moving the elderly couple towards the left and reducing the width of the overall piece.
Reduce the size of the children’s mouths as they looked too much like animation art rather than picture book art.

I incorporated those changes here and also laid out some rough Black & White values to help me with the contrast between the different parts of the artwork when I determine colours later.

COLOUR THUMBNAILS:

As I had a strong vision of the colours I wanted for this, I only did 2 colour thumbnails, with a minor difference of the grass colours. I chose to go with Option 1 as it fitted the fantastical vibe just a bit more.

FINISHED COLOUR:

This was the piece with all the colour and texture incorporated which I sent to my agent for feedback. While the colours throughout were already bright and cheerful, I intentionally chose even brighter neon colours for the butterflies and the waves surrounding them to really contrast them from everything else and emphasises the magical feeling.

FINAL ART:

After a few more tweaks, this was the final approved art. The biggest change from the previous version was that I removed all the other paper drawings that the surrounded the adults (i.e. in the pocket of the pink-haired woman, under the ladder and on the bench). While my intention was to show that those were the things my main character drew that came to life to help/bring joy to those people, my agent felt they were unnecessarily cluttering the piece so I removed them.

And there you have it! I hope you enjoyed reading this and found it insightful. Let me know if there are specific pieces of my art that you want me to do a breakdown like this next - just leave a comment or drop me an email. :)