Templar Publishing

Templar publishing is a leading figure head in the publishing industry, more renowned for its 'Ology' series,( dragonology, mythology, oceanology etc) which have become massive hits all across the world, and the one reason why Templar publishing caught my attention, thanks to how well these books stood out amongst it's other competitors and how diverse and different they were to other books, for example in the dragonology books you will have 5 pages dedicated to stickers, and ten during the book you will have envelopes that contain maps and other little goodies for the reader.

The images below are screen shots of how to contact Templar for publishing books and sending in artwork.

To send in any artwork, they prefer electronically sent in examples of work the address is below

Artwork Submissions

• Please send electronic samples of your work tosubmissions@templarco.co.uk

• Compile your samples into one PDF file. Separate image files may not be reviewed.

• We prefer art submissions by email, but if you need to send a hard copy, please use the following address and mark your submission 'ARTWORK SUBMISSION':

The Submissions Team,
The Templar Company Ltd,
Deepdene Lodge, Deepdene Avenue
Dorking, Surrey, RH5 4AT

The following pictures below are photo's of the book titled "Working With Dragons" which is part of the Dragonology series that Templar Publishing is well known for. 

Along with the book, there are several pull out maps, pocket maps, stickers etc. This diversity and difference in books is a great help in referencing my book, as I would like to create a series of stickers for my book.

Curious Creatures of the world

I started to research curious creatures around the world, and I stumbled across a couple of Sea slug species called Glaucus Atlanticus & Nembrotha Cristata. Both very strange creatures appearance wise, and have great bio's about them. The creature that I find the most curious is the Nembrotha Cristata, this colourful sea slug lives among the coral reefs of the world, which it feasts on, and most noticeably is the coral like growth on its back, which it uses to breath in the air particles of the water, this fantastic creature will be used as a main reference to my sea slug monster series, the diversity of these creatures is brilliant and will help me create some weird and whacky creatures.

Along with the sea slugs I came across the Leafy Seahorse, this marvellous creature is fantastic, and shows the wonders of evolution at work.  This creature again is very curious especially by its appearance and how its evolved to blend in with its background by resembling a floating seaweed, so it can hide away from would-be predators. I won't be using this creature as a reference but will be used to show why I've done certain additional features on the Monsters that make an appearance in my book.

Monster four - Battius Hare

Along with the Bear, I had fun drawing the Battius Hare, mainly because of how I turned a innocent sweet little bunny into a big bat eared creature with tentacle for whiskers, and bat like wings between the arms. The idea for the monster came about when I was at a pet centre and was instantly drawn to a Lop-Eared Giant. 

The ears on this rabbit were HUGE, so big in fact that you got the impression that it could happily fly away in the wind because of the sheer size of these ears.

Monster three - Fungius Bear

This creature seems to have been the most positively received monster of my creation. Had quite a lot of fun creating this monster, especially when it came to adding on bits of fungi and tree branch growing from the skin of the bear-like monster. 

Monster Two - The Basilisk

Quite a popular monster, with a few renditions being created along the way (most notably the version used in Harry Potter) I wanted to create the Basilisk, as it has been described since the beginning of this mythological creature, which was to create a chicken/lizard hybrid, which I feel I have achieved quite well with the final piece. The process on creating the Basilisk was a simple one. I started of drawing a chicken, and practicing how the feathers and body form work together, and then slowly add lizard features, such as the frilly neck features from the Frilly Lizard, and a random lizard like tail sprouting from behind.

Monster one - The Long Leafed Frog

The first addition to my monster book, is the Long Leafed Toad. Very heavily based on the Toads of our world, I edited this creature a few times before I was happy with the final piece. After I was happy with the finished piece, I began to see what colour would work well on the toad in my eyes I preferred the light brown toad, as you can see the green and brown mixing together as well as the leaves standing out.

After coming up with the correct colour mix, I then began to see what colour toad would work well on the tea stained paper that I was going to use as my background in the books, and what text would work as well as.

No Brow Bestiary

No Brow's Bestiary booklet is another useful little bit of research to see how they have laid out all their pages in the book. I quite like the simplicity of the page layouts, with one page being dedicated to the image, with no text what so ever, and the next page having the creatures name along with a brief description of the character. The white background works really well with the plain black text, and the text itself works along the same theme as the image. The colour code is repetitive and quite simular to each other.