Update on my Children's book

Recently my self published children's book Klyde's animal alphabet' has been circulating around my local area and is being sold in the local bakery/post office. My mum orchestrated the distribution of my book and has since send it off to distant relatives and anyone else who will be willing to view it personally.
My mum has also taken the book to the schools she teaches at and they have gone down very well in the early classes.
They have photocopied pages from the books to be used as worksheets for the younger children and read out the book numerous times.
Its all seems to be going well at the moment.

I also uploaded my book onto the site Utales, which is a service offering children's books to be easily accessed through iPads and devices like that. The site is free to upload and with that you can get extremely valuable feedback from the Utales people and also the users. I got some really great feedback with I will take on-board to make the book even better.
UTales works as an app that is free to download but to read the books you either have to purchase a subscription or buy the book in its Utales format. A portion of the sales go straight to me, and a small portion also goes to charity, which is great!

First self published Book!

Over the summer I also worked on a little children's book that I was going to self publish as a little insight into how book making works and thing like that.
I came up with the idea of making an alphabet book using my character Klyde..
It took me 3 days of solid work but I made 28 full colour illustrations and a front/back cover and all the other stuff needed for the book.  I wrote it myself too, which was a challenge as I don't think im very good with writing an engaging story.. although alphabet books don't have to have much of a story.
Here are a few sneak peaks at some of the illustrations in the book.
There not too fantastic as I did them all in a short space of time, but it was mostly an experiment anyway!

 

It was then made up and printed by lulu.com, which is a great little place to self publish providing you can put in the work to put the book together and then just upload it as a .pdf file.

I can also sell my books on the Lulu site if they come out okay. So it could make me a little bit of money and get my work out there...

The books came and they look fantastic! Im so pleased! 

This has been a great little thing to do, and a great practice into what I want to do in the future!

Id love to create and illustrate for books like this as a job... =D

Illustration Friday

Over the summer, I started doing 'Illustration Friday'.

Its a great platform to get your work noticed and also pushes me to create work based on themes I wouldn't usually work on. Theres a great community of Illustrators on there that can give great advice or show their appreciation. 

Ive learned alot from doing it every week and it has also been a great deal of fun! I think that by doing it, my illustration work has improved alot. 

Here are a few examples...

Mesmerizing-

I'm really impressed with this one. The composition looks good and the colours seem to work really nicely. I pushed myself to draw more realistic characters and a more realistic setting and it really payed off.

To me, my digital work has improved alot in terms or cleanliness and its overall impact.

Mysterious-

This was an experiment into making a storybook style illustration, using a character Id made up for use in Comics and Storybooks that I aim to produce during my second year. I think It came out really well and good easily be straight out of a storybook. 

Like it said before, my digital work is becoming much more refined and dynamic.

Imperfect-

My Illustration Friday debut. Which was received extremely well, considering I didn't take too much care over the piece in terms of execution. 

I based alot of my IF's on constructing a character from the prompt, so in this case I created and imperfect mouldy onion character. 

This was a great idea as it pushed my character design skills which to me is the most fun part of illustration... creating the characters to play around with.

It was featured in 'Friday Favourties' on this blog-
http://hello7arts.com/blog/2011/08/friday-favorites-imperfect/