Full page sketches.

Then I draw full size sketches. I finished them yesterday! We are a little bit ahead of schedule.

Then I scan them in and put them in the layout to make sure the words fit in the space in the picture, and everything looks OK. This is the InDesign layout of the book with the draft sketch placed in.

I often use photoshop to fix a picture. I can cut things out and move them around on screen so that if someone's arm is too long I don't have to go back to drawing and rubbing out.

Layout magic.

Now we are about to catch up to real time drawing!

When we did the first two books we worked out the production process as we went along, so it was pretty hard. We just didn't know what we were doing, how to actually make a childrens book. Fitting words and pictures together is tricky, let alone that the format changed and pages were added after I had already sketched all the pages for one story. Anyway, now we know what the format is and now we have a system for producing them to minimise having to redraw or rewrite when something has already been worked on.

First the story is written and edited, then we have a meeting—author, illustrator and publishing director—to talk about changes. For example, I found with the first books that a lot of dialogue in a big chunk is hard to illustrate interestingly. Things might need to be written with a more careful mind to the illustrated pages.

Stephanie and I then break the text up into pages. We note down where an illustration could be a full spread, where a page-turn is needed for suspense, etc etc, and spread it out over 21 pages.

Then I draw thumbnails while Stephanie helps say what the illustrations will be. This is a good part, because we think very much the same! When I draw something she usually says "That's what I was imagining it to look like!" so it's very easy. Here are some thumbnails. I try and take into account the space needed for the text. You can see the top right one, that's a spread: two page illo. The bottom right is a full page on the left and a spot illo on the right—some objects isolated.

So these thumbnails become the plan for the bigger sketches. They also bring up problems (eg. too much to fit on a page) before I do any real work.

Family proportions.

I was VERY concerned that I kept drawing the children too old. It's hard to be consistant. Feedback from Stephanie was that I was adding 3 years to Luke and Emily, and I was making the baby too much of a baby. So she took some photos of families from church to show me the relative sizes. Then I drew a version of our book family. I scanned it in and used photoshop to adjust their proportions, mainly leg length.

Mum   Ben   Emily   Luke   Dad

From this, I made some coloured rulers in InDesign, so that when I was putting my drawings into the layout I could also check if the relative heights were correct. And then I also had to constantly remember to make Luke and Emily's legs and arms short, so that they looked little. Fat tummies also make kids look young! A few years older and they get much lankier.

And this drawing is pretty much how they look in the books. The end size of the books meant that the drawings are quite small, so the simpler illustration style of this sketch is basically how I ended up drawing the finished scenes. All my lead-up was too detailed and too big. Drawing it smaller like this forced me to simplify, especially the faces: just dots and spots. I find the hardest part of the face to draw is the bit between the nose and the top lip, so at this size I don't have to draw it at all!

Coloured portrait.

Eventually I had to go to colours, and although I haven't done much watercolour, it seemed the most appropriate style: a lot of control and subtlety. Actually, I had no idea if I would be able to do decent watercolour or not, I just hoped I could! So I painted this, which took half or most of a day I think. It was the big test of my illustration technique, because the books probably wouldn't go ahead unless my illustrations looked professional.

The main breakthrough was outlining. Instead of using a black artline pen, I used pencil: black and grey. It meant I got variation in line weight, more control, less overpowering outlines, and I could rub stuff out—rather than ruining a lovely bit of watercolour with an inky black line in the wrong place.

I've since discovered, doing the last Christmas cards, that it's easier with a super fine pen, like a 0.1 mm. So different to a 0.4 artline. But I still don't feel safe with ink, there is no undoing it!

Character sketches.

I thought it would be handy to have some "portraits" so that I could draw from them. Babies and children are different shapes to adults, in the face and body. So I drew the different characters a few times to get used to drawing different ages, and to have some references. The more I drew, the better I got, because of practice.

Not very good Emily

Better Emily with practice faces at different angles

Baby brother Todd/Ben

Older brother Luke

Dad and Mum

I did a series of portraits of all the family. Some things I started working out at this stage:

• Eye-shaped eyes don't look as good as just dots and eyebrows. 
• The shorter the arms and legs are, the younger the child looks.
• I like drawing feet.
• I'm trying to make them look messy and casual. It's hard to go against my instinct to make everyone beautiful, but I tried to make the Dad have a bit of a tummy and a receding hairline, the mum look mum-shaped, the kids chubby.
• I've figured out that I should draw hair in big chunky outlines. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't at all.
• I have to draw Emily's body first and then draw her dress over the top and then rub out her body.
• Stripes look really cute. Lots of Bonds-style striped clothing.

My particular favourites.

I worked out the drawing style for these books with two illustrators as inspiration: Shirley Hughes and Freya Blackwood.

I love how modern and subtle Freya Blackwood's work is, and how people are half real half simplified. I later used her watercolour style as my guide to watercolouring—she's a lot better than me, but better trained and more devoted, so it's only fair. Oh, I wish I could draw like her.

I read some Shirley Hughes when I was little. I love how she fills her pages with childish details: grubby hands, frowns of concentration, pants falling down, wind-blown hair. She has a very unique style I have no hope of attempting!

I also used the photography on pumpkinpatch as a guide for little kid's proportions, at this stage. I was really working things out from a very basic level. I don't draw much so I didn't have a "style" ready to go.

Learning to draw.

I did a fair bit of illustration in my design course. I picked illo electives because I fancied myself as a drawer. I actually haven't done a lot of drawing at all in the 5 years since I left uni. I don't make art for fun; since design is my job I prefer to sew or play piano or other things. I've drawn things like tractors and gas bottles for some jobs.

Now, the only way to be a really good drawer is to draw a lot. Like getting better at tennis or knitting. Practise makes perfect. So I did a few pretty bad drawings, then a lot of mediocre drawings, and finally a presentable set of illustrations. I think there is a real difference between my stuff and stuff done by people who draw for a living and draw all the time—their ease of drawing something beautiful. Being so good that you can be simple and eloquent at the same time. I'm not there, but maybe by the time I've done 20 books…

So anyway, there was a lot of work to get good at drawing before I published a picture.

Seriously ugly:

Anything I outline with black pen looks dreadful. I've never been able to do it.

Next one has potential. Simple, but too cartoony:

Too real:

The next page is also too real… but getting there. Sister, brother, mother actually look very similar in physical appearance to the finished versions, but haven't worked out a painting style yet. There are... encouraging signs. I realised that watercolour with a light pencil outline was the best: black outlines still don't work.

Everything comes down to practice! Boring yet true.

My amazing blog design skills.

I'm not at all a designer for electronical things like webpages, so this blog was pretty tricky to make :) I didn't just use a standard template, I downloaded one off a free template website, then uploaded it into this one, then it didn't have the navigation bar so I couldn't enter a post... but then I discovered it was just hidden, so I typed in "visible" in the html. So now I feel like a web designer.

The template comes with a Twitter thing, which I think is very cute, but there is no actual Twitter of this blog. The RSS thing works though.

I love blogs! And they're free!

First sketches.

I'm a designer who can draw, so theoretically I can illustrate children's books... 

I thought it would be interesting for people to see the process of illustrating and putting a book together. I've kept all my first drawings from the last year, so I'll show how I worked out the style of illustration and got better at it, then I'll skip to the book I'm working on now and blog the process in almost real time. Although I've already sketched a first draft.

This is the first thing I drew, I think. It is for a book in the MM series still in the pipeline about a toy picnic or something, and it was a test run when the idea for doing these kid's books was still a hazy potential. It's rather cute and very on the realism side. Realism is a lot of hard work, it was a good thing we didn't go down that path.