The Leopard and the Sky God case study

In December 2006 I was commissioned by Usborne Publishing to illustrate a title in their First Reading series entitled The Leopard and the Sky God. The story features in Level 3 of the series, written especially for children who are learning to read.

Creating characters

To begin, I developed character drawings for the three main characters of the book - The Leopard, the Tortoise and the Sky God. I then coloured up one drawing of each character. This helped both the client and me to visualise how the main characters were going to look throughout the story.

Artwork

To produce the artwork in The Leopard and the Sky God I used a combination of acrylic paints, watercolour pencils and computer-generated paint techniques to achieve the finished result. These are the materials I generally use to create my illustrations. The book consists of 48 full-colour pages, which took me approximately 3months to complete, and was released in September 2007.

All artwork from Usborne First Reading: The Leopard and the Sky God. Copyright Usborne Publishing.

Visit the Usborne Publishing website at: www.usborne.com