Above: Ink drawing the the style of E.H. Shephard.

Below: Drawing inn the style of Laura Vaccaro Seeger. Drawn using  a twig dipped in India Ink, then background added and coloured on Photoshop.

Earnest Howard Shepard who was born on December 1, 1879, most significant works were his Winnie the Pooh illustrations which we originated from ‘The Tales of Christopher Robin’ books by author A.A. Milne published between 1924-1928. E H Shepard continued to draw ‘Winnie the Pooh’ for the rest of his life.

The characters and scenes in ‘The tales of Christopher Robin’ were inspired by A.A. Milne’s home in Sussex which is where I grew up. He was inspired by the woodlands that were his surroundings at his country home and by his son’s toys, which he based his characters for the Winnie the Pooh books on.

I choose this artist as I also love to draw animals and I really like the style of Earnest Howard Shepard work.

 

• There are elements of E H Shepard’s work, mostly it does not look dated as the backgrounds are forests which do not change from decade to decade and the toys are also not dated. However the characters he draws are dated by their hairstyles and clothing. He also drew a lot of illustrations of the wartime. His style is more detailed than a lot of artist use today and his colours more subtle. Whereas current artists tend to use more bold and block colours to illustrate children’s books, with a lot less detail. Perhaps due to needing to produce illustrations faster for tighter deadlines. He uses a lot of pen work with many small lines and hatching to shade his work.

 

• For my contemporary artist, I chose Laura Vaccaro Seeger. She also illustrates children’s books with animals as her subject matter. I chose her for this reason, but also because her illustrations are vastly different from that of E H Shepard. Her illustrations are very bold, and almost harsh when compared to E H Shepard’s work. Laura uses block colour and little detailing to create her characters. I admire the way that she creates such powerful characters with such a simplistic style. Whereas E H Shepard uses words to drive the narrative and tell you what is happening in the illustration, Laura uses speech bubbles and clear facial expressions to show what is happening in the story rather than using many words.

Tools

The materials E H Shepard used was mainly pencil, which when finalised he would then ink over to create is final image. In later years he started to colour his drawings with watercolour paint.

Laura Vaccaro Seeger uses a variety of mediums such as oil paints and watercolour, however the book that I liked the style of the most happened to be hand drawn using a twig dipped in Indian Ink to give a rough finish, then painted on computer software. In an interview she said that she had a background in television and animation so tends to think of the story and map it out in the same way she would for a story board for tv. And this shows through in the types of line drawings and block colours she uses, which is visually very strong, however is not at all like the whimsical drawings of E H Shepard.

Conclusion: It was fun trying the styles of two very different artists for this exercise. It pushed me to add more elements in to the drawings than I usually would in order to try tell a story as this is something I have not done before. I am very proud of the results and my first attempts of colouring on Photoshop.

I find it quite difficult using ink as I am not always so accurate as I don’t have the steadiest of hands, so it did take me a couple of attempts to get each drawing outlined. Photoshop was a new experience as I have only briefly used it to change the colours and remove backgrounds of my drawings before. I do not have a tablet so I had to do it all with the trackpad on my laptop, which was very difficult and time consuming and meant it was very hard to get neat line on my shading. I decided just to embrace it as perfection was not the goal and I am pleased with the results.

Using a twig to ink with had it’s own challenges, I experimented with many different twigs to try to get one that was small enough, yet sturdy enough to draw with. The ink did not last for more that a centimetre and a half at a time so I had to repeatedly re-dip in ink, luckily the lines were not supposed to be neat and rather more organic so it still worked okay.