Scott Campbell is an illustrator I've followed for quite some time and I absolutely love his work! His book 'East Dragon West Dragon' inspired the idea to do 'Monsters with Hats' for my book. I love dragons and beasts (cute ones in particular) and thought it would be great to create a cute little story with monsters like Scott Campbell does.
Anyway.. on to his work!
This is a spread from the for-mentioned book and it shows off his wonderful style. All his illustrations are created traditional with watercolour, layering up colour on top of the sketches (composed digitally and printed out) and adding a 'wobbly' watercolour line over the colours to give lovely soft linework which seems to make the characters even cuter.
He draws in quite a flat way with the characters sitting on relativity flat plains which makes the illustrations look very child friendly and almost puppet or play like.
His characters are insanely cute, including this zombie above and I think the watercolour adds to this cute feel, the subtle colours adding a delicateness. I really love this technique of only using watercolour and would love to give it ago. I use watercolour allot myself but often combine it with bold back outlines which add a very graphic feel, but I will love to experiment with this technique of drawing with the paint.
I also love the simplicity of his compositions, often focusing on a few characters on plain backgrounds. It dosen't over compliment the illustrations even though when he dose incorporate background like the dragon picture, it still looks great.
His work has really inspired me to experiment more with the way I paint and copose my images. Its also made me want to draw lots and lots of cute monsters so that they will take over the world!
Good job I'm making a book about cute monsters then!
