New Work! (And How I Did It)

Hello all. I recently finished an illustration for a picture book I am working on and thought I would share a few words on my process.

I always start with a thumbnail sketch. My thumbnails are about 3" tall. The picture book I am working on has about 15 illustrations so I draw the thumbnails within the context of the whole book. That way, as I am working on the thumbnails, I can see how they are all relating to each other and the overall flow of the book.

When I am happy with the thumbnails, I move on to a tighter, final sketch. This is the part of the process I enjoy the most. I am by nature, a drawer, so the final sketch is where I really inhabit the illustration.

With this particular sketch, however, I was not quite satisfied with some of the elements. It was almost identical in composition to the sketch that precedes it in the book, and I felt I needed to zoom out a bit to give it some intrigue.

To fix the problem, I cut the drawing up in Photoshop so I could scale and move each figure to achieve a more dynamic composition and point of view. I also dropped in a different view of the house from another sketch!

When I was happy with the Photoshop work, I printed it out and traced it onto a new sketch. You'll see that I also made some updates to the characters to make sure they were more consistent with the other drawings in the book.

Next I produced a color comp in Photoshop to make sure I had a color scheme that was working and since this is the first illustration I completed for the picture book, I was mindful of the costume colors and how they would work in other illustrations throughout the entire book.

Now it is time to paint. First, using an inkjet printer, I printed a fairly faint image of the sketch onto the cold press illustration board. I paint in watercolor. I started with an underpainting of ultramarine to determine how all the shading will be distributed.

I continue painting.

Once the painting portion was finished I drew over the illustration with a black colored pencil, to emphasize line and bring back the "drawn" quality of the original sketch.

Here is the final product. I hope you enjoyed following along, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments. Thanks for reading!

Josh