Book Illustration. Concept Art to Line Art the Process

 Main character concepts.

 Village huts.

 Main character sculpts in Sculpey. I've been told to try Super Sculpey as it's suppose to be way better, hence the name...

I start an illustration with rough composition thumbnails(not posted) to establish the major shapes. These sketches become more and more focused till I feel confident enough to start the final illustration. In this case I worked traditionally with loads of tracing paper. I started by using red Prismacolor pencil. (You can see remanence of this in the scans) Then I traced over top with a mechanical pencil. The little "X" marks help me line up the different scans in Photoshop.

I may not like my first line work with one of the characters. So instead of erasing I simply remove that piece of tracing paper and replace it with a fresh one. Hence all the separate pieces.

 Here are most of the characters scanned in and cleaned up.

Then I add in the BG, and some extra foreground elements.

BG to a second illustration.