Hide and shriek!
Here’s the opening spread from Where’s My Mummy? This scene shows Mama Mummy getting Baby Mummy ready for bed—but Baby wants to play one more round of hide & shriek.
Since they’re mummies, I designed an interior to look like the inside of a pyramid, with lots of Egyptian details. The legendary art director at Candlewick, Caroline Lawrence, felt the setting didn’t convey enough ghoulishness, so she asked me to redraw the scene with a gothic interior.
Revised sketch with gothic details below. Architecture geeks will note the new shape of the columns, rough-hewn stone walls and groined vault arched ceiling.
I changed the oil-burning lamp to a candelabrum, but doused the candles in the color version because they were causing me lighting/shadow problems. I kept the sarcophagus bed from the first sketch.
The light is coming from a single source. More dramatic and easier to paint. Also, the viewer’s eye naturally looks to the light source, which is where I put Baby Mummy.