I still have a few sketches to do for my children’s book “Ryan’s Truck of Eggs”. But I decided to still go ahead and do some color/style samples: Sketches on their own don’t tell you what colors you would I use, or whether to use watercolor or collage or digital mixed media. So, color and style experiments it was. And this is what came of it so far:

As you can see, I used a combo of watercolor and ink, as well as some collage technique. I mostly stuck to red, yellow, and dark blue paint. I’ve actually shied away from watercolor for a long time: Once you do something, you can’t reverse it. But since I’ve seen so many beautiful watercolor illustrations, I decided to challenge myself to it. The results started out looking bad but eventually surprised me. The key is patience and planning the layers. The test piece on cardboard only took a few minutes. But the full illustration took 6-7h over the course of 2 days.