Thursday, July 14, 2011

Suki The Very Loud Bunny

In February Dutton Children's Books released my fifth book with Carmela and our first book outside of the Ella The Elephant series, Suki The Very Loud Bunny. If you take a look at the concept artwork from my November 2008 post you can see how the final illustrations have evolved into something lighter, brighter and bit more in the vein of the rendering style of the Ella books.


With the character design for this book I tried to straddle a line between "real" bunnies and something a little more anthropomorphic. They can sit upright, but I never show them walking or running on their hind legs. Like real bunnies, they don't wear clothes or have opposable thumbs, however, their facial features were arranged in a somewhat more 'human' fashion to help convey emotion.


The environments of Suki's world didn't turn out to be quite as complex as I'd originally envisioned in the concepting phase, but they did end up being more detailed than the backgrounds for Ella.