Harriet & the Hair Fairy Illustrations

You may remember my post about the book covers I designed for my final university project, illustrating my decidedly odd story about Harriet, a little girl with no hair, and the Hair Fairy, who goes on a series of ill-fated adventures in order to clothe Harriet's head.

Well, here are some illustrations to go with the story; some character sketches, a concept for a scene and an oil painting!

The Night Mare, who donates some of her tail strands that keep growing and growing;

The Hair Fairy

Harriet with a knotted clump of fine golden hair

An oil painting! I'd been wanting to do one for ages, I prefer the original pencil sketch but I think that's just because I'm so out of practise with oils. I love 'em :D

Harriet book jackets

So! That thing I promised would be uploaded the next day a shameful amount of time ago is finally photographed and ready to go. It's my final project for the University of Brighton: book jackets for my children's story 'Harriet and the Hair Fairy'.

I wanted to step away from my standard fare of spidery drawings, I felt like I'd got a bit trapped in this one discipline and it was stifling my creativity. So I decided to delve again into the primary-school world of Making Things With My Hands and got very messy, did lots of things wrong, changed my plans a few times, and ended up with something I actually quite liked! (SHOCK AND HORROR)

I wanted to explore the relationship between the planes of the 3D puppets and the 2D cover.. I guess I was trying to do something a bit meta, that whole 'look at the photographic image becoming a flat drawing' type thing.

The story is about a bald girl (Harriet), who is visited by the 'hair fairy', a little old lady who flits around with a purse full of hair 'seeds', ready to plant into the heads of newborn babies. Since Harriet appears to have been forgotten, the Hair Fairy decides to enthrone her head with all kinds of fantastic hairy solutions which all, of course, somehow manage to go disasterously wrong.
I chose to depict three of these on the covers; golden hair that's so fine it gets into an impossible tangle, hair so long it becomes unmanageable and a head of beautiful beautiful flowers that bees find irresistable.
It's a bit of weird story, I know. I'm not expecting it to get published or anything. >_>

I'll post the digital versions, so you can see the covers in more detail.