Illustrations so far

I'm really enjoying my children's book writing and illustration class, it's called Picture and Word. Here are my illustrations for that class so far.
One of our first assignments was that we were given a name of an object, and then we had to create a character out of that object, write story based on that character, and create a finished illustration (all in one week!). My word was "wrench". I really liked how my story turned out, but I did my illustration in acrylic, and wasn't very happy with it:


An assignment two weeks ago was to write a story based on a childhood memory and then do a finished illustration for it. I couldn't think of any memories of my own that could add up to a story with a beginning middle and end, so I used my brother's memory that he told me one time, of how he followed the cat because he wanted to see where it went, and they ended up sleeping in a prickle bush. Also, we had to make our main character an animal. So I had to make my brother into a bear.


So much work went into creating that bear character! I had to do a lot of sketches based on images of real bears, and then the trick is, to simplify from the realistic, that's what my teacher said, and it really works! Here's the final illustration of that:


But the bear was a little too old (it should be the age of the kids reading the book), and my teachers felt a bear mixed with a cat was a strange combo, so I had to make it back into a boy. So then I did a sketch of that with tracing paper, but the boy was too old, so I had to enlarge his head to make him younger, so many things to think about!


Last week's assignment was to take one of three fairy tales and make it our own. Somehow, mine ended up being about Stanley the Lonely mosquito, which I somehow got to out of Litttle Red Riding Hood. I really enjoyed working with collage and watercolour for this one (it's a mosquito talking to an elephant):


This week we have to write a non-fiction story, and then do a finished illustration for it. It is definitely a lot of work! Plus I have two painting to start and finish by Thursday, yikes!