Illustration Challenge #15: The Elephant and the Bad Baby

 (My personal Illustration Challenge for 2017 is to complete one 'page spread' from a popular, modern or classic children's story each week, picked randomly from a hat. Using lines from the original text, I am re-creating the 'imagery' in my own way, just for fun!)

And they went rumpeta, rumpeta, rumpeta, all down the road...

The Elephant and the Bad Baby written by Elfrida Vipont, illustrated by Raymond Briggs, published 1969

One of my ALL TIME favourites this week, and I was terrified of not doing it justice, so I drew the initial pencil sketch days ago and it has sat in my sketchbook glaring at me. I really didn't want to proceed and ruin it, and thus ruin one of my favourites.

How do you even follow Raymond Briggs with those amazing illustrations full of energy and movement and colour? I had forgotten that he does actually use both full colour and black and white images in this book.

I decided I can draw elephants - no challenge there - and I really wanted to do another 'group' image, as they are much harder. This page seemed the hardest.

How does one draw a whole row of people crashing suddenly into the thing they have just been chasing? How do you give seven people characters when they barely speak?

They had to be up in the air.

They had to look uncomfortable and squashed.

And I modernized some of them, just for fun (and whoever hears of a barrow boy these days, anyhow?!).

And the ice-cream man, and the pork butcher,

and the baker, and the snack-bar man,

and the grocer, and the lady from the sweet shop, and the barrow boy

all went BUMP into a heap.