Bedtime Adventures: Behind-the-Scenes
Creative Process
I’ve been playing with the process of illustrating from what I see on the page, and then letting it play out. Check out the process behind this piece:
Work in Progress 1
It started with the idea of a couple, the person on the left bringing a giant boba drink to the other as a gift. The person on the right was sitting on top of a duck. As the sketch progressed, I imagined removing the bubble tea drink, maybe the person was also sitting on another animal (I tried a turtle). In the end, I replaced it with a duck, but instead of a real duck, it would be a toy duck which seemed like an interesting concept:
Work in Progress 2
As I redrew the lines of the sketch, I also saw the person standing on top of a tight rope. I decided to explore this idea a bit:
Final Piece
After taking a break, I decided to go back to the duck idea. Wanting to play with light, I added a spotlight coming from the top right corner. Drawing the door for where the light was coming in is what turned the scene into a child’s room. Adding in a few details like the sock, the bed, and the crayons to flesh it out is what made me understand the reason for the toy duck vs. the real duck.
The story become about a child after going to sleep, waking to their dreams to find a heroine arriving on a duck with an invitation for adventure.
From the initial sketch to final piece, some illustrative decisions I made that I love are:
Removing the harnesses from the ducks to be a more mutual relationship; the heroine with a cape is soothingly petting the duck as they adventure together
The initial journal drawings with the crayons in the top middle were of a dog; I changed it to a person on a duck as if what the child had drawn in the daytime inspired what came alive at night
Putting the slippers going in opposite directions, as if the child casually slipped them off before going to bed instead of putting them neatly side by side contributed to a more child-like feel to the piece
What else do you see in the piece?
Hope this illustration inspires your own adventures and imagination!
Sometimes we can create just from what we see, step by step.
