Behind the Scenes with Stephen Pym, illustrator of Holly the Honeybee Dancing Star

Designing a honey bee character was more difficult than I expected. Both the author Gordon and I wanted the character to edge towards looking like a real bee. The problem I found was that despite the general concept of a honey bee being quite endearing, in real life they have the appearance of insect-alien-monster-nightmare creatures, especially the faces close up! Thus I spent a fair bit of time trying to come up with a character that was cute, was anthropomorphic enough to be relatable, and yet with sufficient bee realism. 

Here are some of my experiments:  

This one was too anthropomorphic 

Once I had settled on the general look of the character, every body part had to be worked out. I then broke the character down into simple shapes and worked out a way of re-constructing her that could be applied no matter what the angle.
The book was done entirely digitally, using a free graphics program called GIMP.

Here is the progression of steps I used throughout the book, as seen by the Holly illustration:

1.    Storyboard – very quick and crude, just throwing down the ideas

2.    Roughs sketches developing the storyboard

3.    Refining the roughs to the stage where I'm confident they can be inked

4.    Inking or outlining

5.    Adding the local or base colour. At this step I also did the eye reflections

6.    Establishing the light source by adding the lighter shadows  

7.    Add deeper shadows

8.    Add light areas followed by highlights

9.    Add the reflected light on the edge of the deepest shadow, and finally the wings are added last because they're semi-transparent.