This month saw the publication of a book I illustrated for Charlesbridge Publishing' imprint Mackinac Island. The book is 'Hidden New Jersey' and it's the third in a series featuring the States.Written by Linda J. Barth (of New Jersey), it's the first non-fiction book I've worked on - and it was quite a challenge! I thought I'd share some of the process looking at how I tackled the illustrations.
The book's a 'search and seek' concept with hidden objects on each page for children to find. There were a LOT of facts to incorporate on each double spread, each featuring a different area of the state.
This book came to me in an unusual way ... the developer, Anne Lewis, saw my work on my Facebook Fan Page and emailed me to ask if I'd be interested in doing the book. Hurrah for social networking!
I received the m/s in January 2011. At this point I realized just how much research was involved - I took a big gulp. Each area of the book was broken down into a list of facts and suggestions for hidden objects. The developer suggested I write notes on how I saw the images for each page before I started sketching. This was a great idea and saved me a bunch of time ... I spent a couple of weeks looking at images for each page and making rough notes on how I saw then working as a whole. The first thing I realized was that the objects suggested for 'hiding' took away many of the options for great compositions ... so I asked if I could choose what to hide instead. I began files of images for each illustration, making sure I had many different reference and bearing in mind the copyright restrictions on images. I made my own references sketches and often merged many different views, or worked from out-of-copyright photos. This kind of book is hard - there isn't time or money to go round taking your own photographs, which would be the ideal situation!
When I felt I'd researched enough I began to make rough sketches of each layout. In this case the rough sketch was pretty much how the finished image turned out.
I also researched the items I would hide on the page (which are all mentioned in the 'facts').
I also laid out a page to scale with the hidden objects and blocks for the text.