Children's Book Illustration 3: Project 1, Part 2

Greetings, Creative Peoples!

Here is the second installment on the process of our first project for Children's Book Illustration III. This week, we narrowed down our choices for the final spread and did value and color studies. And mixed colors! Woo! Our final goal for this project is to have the following:
1) Three double-page spread sketches from our storyboard.
2) A page of consistent character art, depicting three different action poses, and three different emotions. Color.
3) A finished portfolio-ready piece of art, single page OR double page spread.
4) Do it all in a style and/or medium that we are working to perfect.

I went back through my storyboard and picked some pages to draw a bit clearer and less sketchy:

And then I drew an angry little girl to fulfill the requirement for three emotions:

I've decided to work on a style I've be tweaking here and there, and I really love playing with the colors. It's done in acrylic paint, lots of glazed layers using matte medium, and also involves caran d'ache crayons. I was inspired by the following illustrator's styles:
Judy Schachner, for her use of texture
Mike Wohnoutka, for his cutesy style and use of color
Kelly Murphy, a mixture of textures and bold use of color
Mark Teague, for his clean but cute look
John Rocco, for his textures
Dan Santat, Dani Jones, Will Terry, Megumi Lemons....all very awesome illustrators

And here are some of the pieces I've done in the past as I whittle down on my process:

still have to figure out how to polish the line work on this one...

I like how I handled the line here in this
SECRET image from Project #2!

I was undecided whether I should use a warm or cool under painting, because I wanted the painting to feel wintry cold but also have a bit of electricity to it. So I stuck with the warm colors, because I used a warm brown for the lines. (Also, here's a little lesson on composition from Dan Santat: click here!)

Finally I figured it all out, did my color comps and value study, and found my color palette:

And here is my final piece in its work-in-progress state:

Thanks for visiting! I'll post the rest of the process when I'm done! :)