Many of the magazine’s illustrations are in a cartoon style but for this one the editor Sean wanted to go for a more naturalistic, concept-based approach.
I decided to focus on the girl and show her in a reflective mood maybe thinking about her cousins who had just left on their long trip back home
I have roughly outlined my process below from thumbnails to final art.

The completed illustration.

My final pencil drawing that i scanned in at 600 ppi and then reduced to 300 ppi. I cleaned it up a bit in Photoshop and it was all ready to colour.

My final rough sketches. I was getting closer to the want I wanted with the one on the right. A sort of combination of my reference photos.

More developed roughs. A bit too close to my photo reference (left) so I went for a more impressionistic look (right).

Early sketches working from my reference.

This photo of a girl with her reflection was my main inspiration. Love the wistful contemplative expression. I wanted to get a similar feeling in the drawing. Photo reference from Flickr.

Thumbnails showing various compositions. Originally thought of including the Mother.
Sorry for the delay in updating but I was plagued with some major computer problems. Anyway it was finally resolved this week by having a new hard drive installed in my iMac. Everything working well now.

Rough sketches.

These are my rough development sketches. First I drew the basic pose (left) then on detail paper refined and stylised it further (right).

Method: After I was happy with my refined sketch I transferred it via light box onto watercolour paper using blue Col Erase pencil. Went over the blue line with a Pitt oil based pencil (extra soft). They work well on watercolour paper. Painted using W&N watercolours (pan set) with a little opaque acrylic on the dress, shoes and the gloves.

The brief stated “The diary requires 50 small cartoons to illustrate different study tips. The cartoons should appeal to ages 13-17 approx. and feature both male and
female figures. The purchaser of the diaries will be schools so the cartoons have to walk a fine line between beinq contemporary and still appropriate for schools.”

Here are some of the final designs. The printed size of the artwork is appox. 20mm by 20mm. Since that’s pretty small I decided to create them as vector art, keeping the shapes simple and avoiding black outlines. As usual I began sketching out these characters on paper and then recreated them in Illustrator. I will post some of the initial sketches and roughs soon.