Grad Book Design

Image For The Number One

Image For the 1st Class Stamp

I'm soon to be completing my third and final year at University (eaaak!!) and there is a graduate book that will have artworks from everyone in the class which will be printed and sold, it's so exciting! The theme was numbers and we all had to pick a number at random from a hat.. I picked number one.. no pressure haha. I struggled with this number but was finally happy with the idea of doing an illustrated first class stamp, with an oriental theme which was inspired by Brittney Lee and Audrey Kawasaki's artworks.
So here are the inked sketches for my design, soon to be followed by the complete version! 

The Macmillan Prize Competition 2013 - Little Princess Book Entry

 Little Princess Cover Illustration

 Little Princess page entry 1

 Little Princess page entry 2

Little Princess page entry 3

This was my entry for the Macmillan Competition 2013 (unfortunately didn't end up entering in the end) with my story 'Little Princess'. Our tutors told us to look at existing examples of tales/fables/short stories to either illustrate or use as a starting point for our own story (which I ended up doing).
An obvious.. I chose dragons because well.. I am just obsessed with dragons! My story was basically about a dragon that befriends a little girl and grants her a wish to cheer her up (he found her crying.. aww). She wished to be a princess so as to grant her wish off he went to find her a crown and played princess with her but as most stories have, there is always a bad guy (dun dun dunnnnn). This bad guy is the King Emperor dragon who, seeing everything through his magic ball, gets jealous of the dragon and little girls friendship and wants her for himself. He flies from his castle (obviously) and challenges the friendly dragon for the girl but loses (as bad guys do) and the little girl and dragon fly off into the sky all joyous, ahhh :)

This was my first time using Photoshop to do anything other then a little photo editing and such so it took me a fair while to complete even with giving myself plenty of time, I still ended up just missing the competition deadline.. boo. I'm still pleased with the outcome and it's definitely one of my most favourite pieces. (I'm not sure about the text but we'll leave it as it is for now..)