Illustrated Children's Books

Happy Labor Day

| Gina Lento

We are less than a month away from Inktober and that means the return of the Little Witch and her Dragon.

They are taking a vacation at the shore and are enjoying their Labor Day on the beach. Dragons love the sun on their hides. The laughing gulls are wondering if there are any handouts coming. The Little Witch is enjoying her latest issue of Broom Network Magazine where she is picking up decorating ideas, recipes and reading about the new cauldrons and brooms that are coming out this Fall.

Soon, it will be pumpkin and apple picking time!

((This is the raw sketch. There are some things that I would def tweak if I did this digitally but the joys or working with traditional materials are the quirks and happy accidents that make original art…original….))

I used Arches Text Wove paper and didn’t realize that the watermark is on every page of this sketchbook….LOL. At least I know it’s genuine! This paper is a little more textured which makes the pens I use act up a little bit but I am finding ways to work with it. Watercolor would def work better but I have a set color palette for the Little Witch series with Arteza Brush pens.)

Friendly Faces Day 5

| Gina Lento

As predicted I am already winging it. I used a reference photo from Sktchy but since the Prompt for today is “round,” I made the girl’s head round instead of oval.

Firefly Two Page Spread

| Gina Lento

Here is a two page spread from the Firefly story by Zoë Tucker. I started to do the whole spread in color but I really liked the black and white sketch that I did, especially after I blew it up to actual book size. I tweaked the sketch to a final drawing and added the firefly and some creatures and this is my mixed color and B&W version.

I will probably finish the color version another time…..

Firefly Again

| Gina Lento

This past week was Poses week. I revamped my character again. I actually like trying different things to see what works. Different approaches, different color palettes. Shake things up a bit. This course is for portfolio building so why not push things harder to see where I can go with it?

The color palette for this group was picked by my 4 year old grandson. I emailed the family and I did the girls’ choice last week. This week it was CJ’s turn. The glasses last week were Julian’s when he used to wear them.

All 5 of these fireflies were done in my Soul Journal that John bought for me as a Mother’s Day gift, several years ago, from Innovative Journaling. It’s a leather journal that is refillable. I can put two refills in it which means I can put two different types of paper in there. It’s 5.5 x 8.5 which is a nice size to work on.

I did all 5 on their own page. The paper is Arches text wove and it handles wet media nicely. I’ve used watercolor and acrylic on this paper as well.

Baby Firefly

| Gina Lento

I am taking an illustration course and the main character is a young firefly. We had to turn in our character today. I did this little guy in multiple ways and I was tweaking him up to the last minute because once I really got on the roll, more ideas popped into my head. The flowers were actually an idea that came from my walk this morning. The grandkids had some input into what colors they preferred but my final decision came down to what worked with the background I had in mind.

Shoes

| Gina Lento

Today’s prompt is shoes. When I first sat down to draw shoes, which I have done many times before…I realized that my wardrobe now consisted of various flip flops. I rarely wear shoes anymore except for the few rare evenings when it’s cool here or when I go for my walk. Otherwise I’m holding it in flip flops. This thought prompted me to draw my flip flops and that morphed into playing with some digital colors and textures…

This was a lot of fun and it gave me lots of ideas for more patterns.