How to Begin?

How about we start with the beginning, or a beginning.

In the old days illustrators would do marker comps for ad agencies to pitch an idea to their client - you might have seen this on TV shows like Mad Men. In art college they used to teach us how to do these comps.

During our spring cleaning we found these old marker comp exercises done by Renata in her 2nd year in art college at ACAD.

These would have been created using markers and chalk. The trick was that they had to be done quickly, but photographic - the final ad would likely have used photography. The individual elements would often be drawn separately, cut out, and collaged together.

You can see that Renata is already exploring picture book themes such as mice. (a mouse is the star of the next book Renata will be illustrating)

This is an example of what the final presentation would look like. I think Renata did a pretty good job, of course she might have gotten docked a bit for not having an additional tracing paper flap!