I decided to look at the age-group (3-5) encompassing a wide range of abilities and sophistication but probably a full colour book with a couple of lines of text.
In contrast, I went for the 7-9 age-group of Established readers (assuming that I would be illustrating a fairly 'wordy book, so this would not be a full page illustration)
I then decided on a word from the list: 'Sad' - and after brainstorming around it with spidergrams, I settled on a dog, as there's nothing quite like a dog for tugging at the heart-strings!! Particularly a Basset Hound!
Thinking about the two age groups, I made an early decision that humour should be a factor in the illustration for the 3-5 yearold bracket. I wanted to create a 'scene' around the dog...
I wasn't so sure about the older age group - but I thought that they could be asked to cope with a more hard-hitting sadness, something like the experience of abandonment, cruelty, or being lost. A book I looked at for an earlier exercise was 'Harry and Hopper' about the death of a dog, in which the illustrator Freya Blckwood used an ephemeral soft wispy pencil line as 'Hopper' vanishes from Harry's life. It's aimed at the age-group 5-7 I would think, but it's sensitively approached.
In my sketchbook I played with some thumbnails. I established a scene for a bassett hound. He had lost his bone, dug up the garden looking for it and then given up, but unknown to him, the bone is sticking out for the reader to see under the island he is marrooned on!!
I tried various sketches to achieve the droopy eyed sadness I was after.
for the older age group, I thought that a caged dog, might be a simple image to communicate sadness,
I also looked at other sistuations - going away, abandonned outside in the rain, wanting a walk, lost in the night miles from anywhere....
I eventually settled on Basset Sadness
And wire mesh, instead of bars...
So the decision for both images was made... the next job was to try to get them onto paper.
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