I'm really thrilled to share my work for Michael Morpurgo's War Horse. After two years of work, it's great to finally have it out there. This was an incredibly challenging project for me, not in the least because of all the horses that needed drawing but also the weight of the story and the emotional connection between the characters but I'm really happy with the results and to be able to share them here with you. The book is out now and it would be hugely appreciated if you liked it enough to buy a copy or give the project a like. Thanks for watching! Tom
DEVELOPMENT WORK
AND PROCESS
Here's some of my development work. I did lots of character design at the beginning, there's quite a few characters in the story and I wanted to get them feeling consistent. I also had to spend a lot of time practicing drawing horses for this one. I took a course by Aaron Blaise - 'How to draw Horses', i'll link to it below. I found it really useful, it gave me a good grounding of how to approach horses and some things to remember. I still find them incredibly hard to draw though, especially without some form of reference imagery for the different angles and poses, horses are tricky animals to get right.
https://creatureartteacher.com/product/how-to-draw-horses/
THE PITCH
Before I won the job, I had to pitch on it. It was a tough process and it took around a year of pitching before I got the go ahead to start working on it. During that time I made a lot of test images and in depth pitch documents outlining my work and approach. I didn't have the text at this point so some of the images are inspired by scenes in the film and the theatre show of War Horse as a starting point. I thought it might be helpful to share a few of the test images I made here, I hope you like them.
Thanks so much for watching!
Thanks
