Illustrating "The Bremen Town Musicians"

 

"The Bremen Town Musicians" by the Grimm Brothers was one of my favourite stories as a child, so this was a labour of love to illustrate and to learn from the process. Mostly I just wanted to make more than one illustration for a story, as I had done in the past, and to make my style a bit simpler and easy to apply.

Reading the story and sketching some ideas for potential scenes was the first thing that I did. Then I set up a board on Pinterest with research (what other illustrators drew for the same story) and reference photos. That helped to not unconsciously repeat what was already done - for instance the "animal tower" (when the dog climbs on the donkey, the cat on the dog and the rooster on the cat) was the most recurring image so I decided not to illustrate that scene, as I found it more funny to imagine anyway.

 Using the reference photos I made some quick study sketches to familiarize myself with the animals.

 

Then came some color sketches and defining the characters. This meant simplifying the shape of the animals to make them easier on the eye.

Illustration #1 - The Common Dream

Out of a few thumbnail sketches, the first composition was selected and enlarged. I used black marker for the outlines and color pencils as well as some Copic markers for filling and shading.

 

A clean workspace plus a moodboard for inspiration can go a long way...

Illustration #2 - Rooster Spots a Light

Illustration #3 - Robbers & Treasure

It's nice to have a little helper, too. And for extra company I find it's nice to have some chatter in the background, especially when working alone in a room. Currently rewatching (or more like listening to) McLeod's Daughters for maybe the tenth time, ha.

 

 

Don't underestimate the value of fortunate accidents! My outline marker ran out after the third illustration, thankfully, and I had to use a liner (S size from Faber Castell), which improved the look of the last illustration considerably.

Illustration #4 - A Feast

Thanks for viewing,
Meruna.

The Monkey Project

The Monkey Project was a comission for the May 2012 Night of Museums exhibition at the National Museum of Art (MNAR) in Bucharest. The idea was to take an element from one of the paintings in the museum and use it to create a new piece of art to be exhibited on the fence of the museum towards Bucharest's main street, Calea Victoriei.

 

 

I chose this mischievous monkey from a painting (can't remember the author or title) and decide to make a sort of comic-like story with the character using only black marker for a tool.
I started doing research at first, found the type of monkey in the painting - a Roloway monkey, the one with the white goatee - who is a little ugly to be honest (meaning I had to make him more human) and started to imagine him in all sorts of situations. So he had chains and he escaped, what would he do next? ...

 So I downloaded all the reference images I needed and printed them after I had written down some ideas of what he would do. I often find that the best ideas come to me in the dark, just by the lightof the computer or when lying down with my eyes closed - maybe it's about all that third eye activation or something..?

After about two A3 pages of pre-sketches to get the feel of the character I simply started drawing with a pencil looking at both the reference photo and the vision in my mind, and then added the marker. As I gained more confidence the pencil was droppped entirely and the drawings were made directly with the marker on paper.

After that came scanning the drawings at high-quality and arranging them in Photoshop to send to the museum for printing and dispaying.

I think the success of this project was due to a few things: having LOTS of practice from art school (the previous two weeks had been spent using a gestural drawing style after a live model), being properly advised to use just black marker as my line drawing was one of my best skills and just using my creativity as I never had before (simply because I was never given an illustration project such as this before).

The entire series has also been colored and appeared as a comic in the March 2017 issue of Romanian COMICS Magazine.

Each monkey is available for digital download in my Etsy shop.

Thank you for viewing,
Meruna.