On the Rampage


The Elephant book I am doing with my Dad has quite a few double page spreads and, like this one, they all have some space on the facing page where the text will go. I’ve already posted some of them here, but up till now I’ve cropped them to remove the “dead space” but this one doesn’t work so well without that shadow, so it accurately shows the proportions of what a two-page spread will look like. Maybe after the book comes out I will post some high-res versions of them which people could use as desktop images.

This is one of about 6 illustrations in the book where I used photo textures. The skin on the elephant’s foot is actually from a photo of an elephant, there is some fabric texture in the hunter’s outfit (though it is a bit too subtle to see here) the hunter’s skin texture is from a close-up photo of spotty terracotta and the ground is also from a photograph of cracked mud, though in all cases I had to manipulate and extend the photo material. It was actually pretty fiddly to get it to work.

I had so many pictures to do of pretty much the same subject matter, that I had promised myself at the outset to try as many different techniques as I could, to keep it interesting for me and, hopefully, for the reader. My only regret in that reguard is that I didn’t get to do any analog paintings. I had initially planned to paint a few of the pics in gouache and acrylic but I ran out of time (I am a slow and fiddly painter) but I did at least get to use some painterly textures I made as backdrops for some of the illustrations. There are a couple of illustrations that I did finish analog; in colour pencil. I will post those later.

This is also one of the very few pics in the book that was totally generated digitally. I had drawn a very scratchy thumbnail drawing for the composition but none of it is in the final art. In most other cases the illustration is built around some sort of analog drawing.

2 thoughts on “On the Rampage”

  1. Nice layout on this Jamie! Congrats on finishing the book. It’s been great seeing some of these come out as you finish them. Thanks for sharing them here. I also enjoyed the variations you tried in coloring these. Maybe you can try the acrylic and gouache takes on BOOK 2!

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