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
What is it about New York City that makes it such a likely backdrop for children's stories? Is it the urban landscape of brownstones and playgrounds that lends the perfect aesthetic? Could it be the incredible human diversity and rich history of the city that makes is such fertile fodder for compelling stories? Is it simply New York City's status as a publishing colossus that makes it a natural mecca for authors and artists? It is probably a mixture of all of these factors. Whatever the reason, after delving into a good amount of children's literature, I could not help avoiding the fact that so many of the stories took place on the fair isle of Manhattan. Whether it was Stuart Little's foray into sailboat racing on the Sailboat Pond in Central Park, or Claudia & Jamie Kincaid's temporary residence in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City's grid is a veritable celebrity map of the who's who in children's literature. Take a look at the map!
