Animal Alphabet

Here are some of our favourite illustrations we did for Colin West’s Animal Alphabet Poems and Rhymes ( #westbestiary on social media). One of which includes this very excited pig baking a cake in the kitchen.

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We responded to Coin West’s wonderful poems, featuring animals from the letters A to Z. This charming zebra is done in coloured pencils and inks.

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One of our favourite things about illustrating Colin’s poems was coming up with playful and often humours animal characters, such as this flamingo wearing roller-skates. To see more of our responses to Colin’s poems visit- https://twitter.com/pipandrach or #westbestiary

Drawing elderly people

Drawing elderly people. Experimenting with colours and line work.

One of the things we love about illustration is designing characters. We are currently drawing elderly people in different scenarios and everyday life. From going to the seaside to reading the newspaper and walking to the shop. We use simple line work to capture the character of the people and use a fine line pen to create subtle details.

A black and white line illustration of an elderly couple enjoying tea and cakes. In fine line pen.

We decided to keep the colours simple, by only adding a few colours in coloured pencils and leaving some parts white. We wanted to keep the delicate and simple line work, so we kept the colour palette simple to highlight certain areas of the illustration.

3D Illustrations

We are currently making a range of 3D paper sculptures and puppets based on our illustrations. We use coloured paper, and pattens paper to create our designs. We plan out the design in 2D form first and then covert it into a 3D form starting with the basic shape and adding more detailed elements from there.

We reference from real life and photographs to make our paper objects as life like as possible, experimenting with different textured and patterned papers to create areas of interest. Recently we have designed a set of paper fruit, cakes and bakes. We like the objects to have a tactile feel so we play with using beads, buttons and shinny embossed paper to give them texture.

We have also created a set of paper objects that are interactive. The paper suitcase comes with a paper passport, hat, clothing and mini paper luggage tags that can all be stored with the different compartments of the suitcase. We enjoy creating paper objects and sculptures that are beautifully presented as well as playful and fun to explore.

How we design and make our character paper puppets

Often when we design characters for children’s books, we come up with little extra designs for paper toys, activity sheets and paper puppets. We base the puppets and toys on characters that we have designed and think of ways we can make them engaging and interactive.

One of our favourite things to make are paper puppets. We draw our characters out a few times on paper and pick a character that we think would work well as a puppet with movable arms and legs. We draw the full character out on to some paper and then we trace the arms, legs and body separately onto some card. To add colour to our character we usually use coloured pencils and collage. We then cut the body, arms and legs of our character out. We make holes in the top off the legs and arms and attach split pins to the body.

Below is an activity page for children to make their own finger puppets. We use collage on the characters to make them more intriguing and playful. We also create activity pages for children to create their own animal masks, party packs and 3D paper objects.