The BookWorm

Today’s story is about a worm named Slippa that loves reading books. She is not a normal worm, instead of staying in the ground with the other worms, she lives in a cozy oak tree branch. Here is where she likes to spend her time reading all sorts of books. Her wish? Experience all the adventures that the characters of her books do. Using her imagination she can be anyone, anywhere. It’s her super power!
The idea behind this concept came to me when I heard the term “bookworm”. Growing up I didn’t like to read and I wasn’t interested in books. I much preferred to watch movies and cartoons. I didn’t know that books could be interesting until I because a mom and I just fell in love with children’s book and illustrations. Always loved arts and drawing, but due to studies I stopped for a long time. Now I’m so happy to have found a place where I can learn art and let my imagination flow once again.

I like to work analogue so for this project I used different mediums.
For sketching I used Prismacolor in Carmine Red because I prefer the way my sketches look when done with a color than grafite. It doesn’t smudge and you can erase any mistakes. To erase I like the Faber-Castell art eraser dust free because when you erase the dust rolls all together and doesn’t create a lot of mess. For paper I used Emma Block’s sketch book.
For the final illustration I used guache for background and placing the big portions of color. For details and texture I used color pencils, water based pastels and oil pastels. Paper used from Stillman & Birn zeta series in A5. This paper is perfect for mixed media (wet & dry).

Slippa is an earthworm that has a passion for books. She loves to explore and travel throughout worlds and places using her imagination.
Now all she needs is to find the courage to leave her oak tree branch… and maybe she will find a friend or two that will be excited to join on her adventure.

To come with the concept of the story my inspiration was the expression “bookworm” as in a person that enjoys reading but also “bookworm” as in larvae which like to feed on the paper and glue of books.
So I thought why not instead of a worm that likes to eat books actually loves reading them?
For the earlier sketches I came up with key words of what I wanted my character to look like and her background (cute with glasses, cozy, coffee or tea, low light, jumpers)

Lately I’ve been inspired to draw all kinds of moss and mushrooms. I love their colours, shapes and textures. For the worm I research different species that I found cute, but in the end I went for a earthworm because is less detailed and you can create different expressions and dress it. Although I didn’t use the “velvet worm” I used their different colours and patterns to come up with the character’s jumper (red, orange and blue).

These are the four poses that I decided to do. And one of them was chosen to be my final illustration.

First layer down in Guache. Final touches made with neocolor 2, colour pencils