The old brown tones of the previous study got a little lost in the warm desert background, so I re-worked the characters with complementary cool tones to help them really stand out. When I finished, I thought I'd landed on a nice style to apply to the rest of the book - at first. When I looked at it again the next morning, however, it still wasn't quite right. I felt I was getting closer to my destination, but the flat background art began to suggest a new possibility.

What if I simplified and flattened the animals as well?



Flattening the characters was a fairly radical change that took a few attempts to get right. It meant that I couldn't rely on light and shadow to define volume and space, and since I wasn't using line work to define shapes I had to rely on value and (to a lesser extent) hue.