Children's book illustration course on CSM

I am going to post some stuff from the children's book illustration course I was on last week.
We made these little rabbit figures in plasticine to draw from.

We drew them from different angles and used them to model postures for a simple story line.

I found this exercise really interesting. After writing the post about Jill Bosserts Children's illustration book, I ordered her two other books from amazon (they cost me about £5 each). They are very much recommended; like the one on children's books they show both the research and idea generation and the actual illustration technique. One things I wondered about was that a couple of the illustrators took the trouble to make little models to draw from. I thought that that was an awful lot of trouble to take, but now, after having seen how much you can get from modelling, it doesn't seem so unreasonable. I think it is especially an advantage if you are doing a lot of pictures of the same character from different angles.


Just a llittle more about  the course. The teacher on the course is April Wilson who has run the same course for many years. The course is very different from the Exploring Illustration course. No coffee breaks for one thing, and a very tight schedule. Each day is divided into two modules, morning and afternoon, and in each module we looked at a technique and tried to apply it in a simple assignment. I think, it is better to take this course as a 10 weeks course where you have a module a week so you will have time to finish the assignment. It was kind of frustrating never really to get finished before we had to move on.

I will post some more from the course the next couple of days.