The Hippogriff Cookbook app has been released on the iTunes store for the iPad, iPhone and iPod. I worked on this project in August and a couple weeks of September. My job was to create an illustration for each of the 25 recipes as well as design the cover for the book/app. The book was written by Perre Di Carlo and Ben Leeds Carson. The idea behind the project was one of collaboration. Initially just between the two writers and eventually bringing me in for the illustrations. Most of the time I was left to my own devices, coming up with my own ideas and working off the text. Either Ben or Perre would chime in to let me know if I was on the right track or steer me in the right direction with one of their ideas.
As mentioned in other posts, the Hippogriff is a mythical creature, the offspring of a griffin and a horse. We had a lot of room to play with the look of the creature. I started by doing some initial studies of eagles, focusing on the head/beak and then wings. I hadn’t done a lot of bird drawing before, so I needed to brush up on that first. After some studies, I started sketching ideas for the various recipes, still allowing myself to explore how we wanted these creatures to look. By the end of the project, not counting sketch revisions, I had done around 170 drawings. And then I remembered I needed to do the book cover. The following is the process we went through to reach the final version seen here. I should note that while I created the illustration, Perre did the titling and cover arrangement. I really like how it all came together.
Step 1. The initial sketch -
I did three quick sketches to get started. I remember it being late and I was rather exhausted at the time, but I needed to get the ball rolling. Perre and I discussed focusing on the head, bringing in the idea of the chefs hat, and working towards a look of cute/innocence. Of these three, Perre and Ben liked the one on the right the most.
Step 2. Finding a starting pose -
I started looking at other pose ideas, trying to keep the basic ideas of the first sketch. To me that was in the eyes, so I tried to keep that consistent throughout these drawings. Except for the pez head version. The hippogriff is a winged animal and while I had that idea integrated into a lot of the drawings, I realized I hadn’t ever explored the idea of the animal in flight. The drawing on the right really caught our attention.
Step 3. Refining the basic idea -
We had our hippogriff, knew the pose we liked and next it was time to further explore the idea presented. We knew we wanted the icon to focus on the head itself, but thought it would be neat to have an interior cover version that had the full scene. I added in elements to show that he was in the middle of cooking or preparing something. You can see that some of the anatomy, in particular the legs of ‘a’ and ‘c’ are quite broken. I’d try and not worry about that during these idea stages. After the idea was solidly down, I’d go back and try to fix anything like that. Ben and Perre liked ‘d’ the most.
Step 4. Getting specific -
I made 10 copies of the chosen drawing and explored variations within that pose. I also played with the proportions of the hippogriff to try and find the right look and feel we were after. What I really wanted out of this stage was to get very specific with our character. I didn’t want us to be locked into the body I had sketched previously. You can see there’s a general body size that I kept to in this set. I really pushed it though in a couple of these, particularly ‘b’ and ‘d’. At the time I had just watched Disney’s Bolt again and really enjoyed the character design of the hamster Rhino. Inspired by his visual appeal and the simplicity of his design, I did a simple ball version for the hippogriff body (b). In my mind that was really pushing the anatomical limits I felt I had set forth in this project. To my surprise that was one of their favorites and I was more than happy to go in that direction.
Step 5. We need a tail –
For whatever reason I hadn’t drawn in the tail for the chosen hippogriff on the previous page. I did a quick page of tail ideas and we eventually went with ‘c’.
Step 6. Final touches –
I added in the parchment background that Perre had created, added hilites and simple shadowing and we were basically done. We had a few revision stages here where we tweaked some small aspects, such as bringing the hat down a little lower on his head. Otherwise that was pretty much it.
