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The final stages of creating the artwork for The Battle for WondLa dust-jacket required me to set down my pencils, pens and paper and grab a mouse, Wacom stylus and keyboard.

As proud as I am of my inking capabilities, I never create the perfect ink drawing. Cleanup is required. Nowadays I correct errors in Photoshop, but way-back-when I would “white-out” the part I wanted to fix in white acrylic paint, then redraw over it. You can see this technique here in a piece from The Spiderwick Chronicles. Look closely at Byron’s wings.

Because India ink is so vibrant, it requires A LOT of white paint in order to mask the error and provide a decent background to re-ink upon. In the end, you are drawing on a bumpy surface of blobbed on paint. I am heartened when I learn that even the most accomplished ink-masters dealt with whiting out mistakes. Here’s a close-up of an original Garth Williams drawing from Charlotte’s Web.

The yellowing of the paper has made his corrections more apparent. Charles Dana Gibson would meticulously patch in a new piece of board to fix his inking mishaps. Once the piece is photographed for reproduction the white-out (or the seams from the patch) would vanish and give the appearance of a perfect ink drawing in the final reproduction. With a home art studio housing new(ish) technology, I now scan my ink drawings and upload them directly into the art director’s ftp folder. This allows for digital cleanup and fixes with incredible freedom.

My first exercise that I run it through is the mirror flip. A common practice in art school, it simply requires looking at a reflection of your artwork. With the image in reverse, errors become more apparent. Let me show you:

This is a scan of the finished ink drawing from Chapter 6 of The Wyrm King from Beyond The Spiderwick Chronicles. Can you see error in the drawing? I couldn’t while I was working on it, so I’ll give you a clue: It has to do with Nick, the boy in the lower left wearing the seaweed cap.

Here is a close-up of Nick scanned for print (a 600 dots per inch [dpi] bitmap).

Now I shall mirror-flip it in Photoshop. The error becomes more apparent in this reversed image – the axis of his eyes are off (among other facial features). A quick digital fix will show how subtle tweaks to line art can make a big difference.

In Photoshop, not only can I erase dust, ink droplets and spatter, I can also alter the drawing itself. Here I am nudging the eye back up a bit and rotating it slightly.

I can also erase any inconsistencies in the line work and redraw whatever needs to be done. Compare the original artwork (left) with the cleaned-up version (right). (Click to see a hi-res image)

And here is the final printed image.

Of course, this begs the question: Why not just ink the whole thing digitally? Because I like to have a physical piece of art when all is said and done. I want something that’s been held and made by human hands. And, despite these tweaks and cleanup, I want some of the ink blobs, smudges and errors created when by drawing by hand. That is part of the charm for me.

That in mind, I tend to err on the conservative end when cleaning up my ink drawings digitally. More often than not, the original drawing looks pretty close to the final printed image.

And here is the inked artwork of Eva for the cover to The Battle for WondLa. I got lucky on this one and it required little clean up (I fixed the pattern on the muzzle of the boomrod, removed strands of hair, and erased lines where her hand gripped the Omnipod). Now she is ready for color, but more on that next time…

Since I am celebrating the 10-year anniversary of The Spiderwick Chronicles this week, today’s Friday Fan Art is appropriately themed. It comes all the way from a small town in Brazil where a young artist turned to the story of Jared, Simon and Mallory for inspiration.

As Pedro patiently waited for his copy of Spiderwick to arrive in the mail his anticipation and enthusiasm for the fantastic grew.  Upon reading the chronicles, he immediately took to the tale and was inspired to create art of his own.

The piece above was directly inspired from Simon and Byron’s epic fight against Mulgarath’s mother Dragon.  Though Pedro has been dabbling in art since he was a toddler, he has only been seriously tending to his craft for the past year.  Currently he is learning how to draw with Photoshop but he also works with pencil and watercolor.

Great palette and movement, Pedro!  You’re Photoshop skills are impressive.  I love the hand drawn quality you have brought to this digital medium.

Keep drawing, keep dreaming.

Just as we launched The Spiderwick Chronicles a decade ago, Holly Black and I are returning to a locally-owned independent bookshop to celebrate the Grace kid’s birthday.

For one night only (May 15th) we will both be signing at Barrington Books, in Rhode Island. Bring your young readers, your camera and your books! (Yes, I really will be handing out FREE Wondla II sketchbooks.)

And, for you art students of Rhode Island School of Art & Design, we shall be visiting in the afternoon and holding a special presentation on creative process and answering any/all questions. I hope we see you there!

I’ve been a fan of paperfolding since my mom bought a copy of Robert Harbin’s Secrets of Origami back in the 70′s.

After I would wear out my paper toys of cranes and rabbits, I would pester my mom to make me new ones. Finally, she told me to read the instructions and learn to make them myself. I folded for many years throughout my childhood and found the hobby highly relaxing. I even made some of my own paper (from tissue and tin foil) in high school so that my paper models would hold their form.

So imagine the paper-folding pleasure that greeted me when origami master, Joesph Wu, sent me a note asking about the details of of my 1994 rendition of Planescape’s Lady of Pain.

Joseph’s work is not new to me. I marveled at his manipulation of paper years ago when I saw his origami D&D denizens.

This model utilizes two squares of paper; one for the head another for the body.

On top of that, he folded the “Pacific Sea-Maid” from Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide!

Thank you for contacting me, Joseph, and for sharing your fantastic folding talents with us.

Be sure to check out Joseph’s facebook page. You can see more pics of these models in progress as well as an additional, larger version of the Lady of Pain.

Keep drawing. Keep dreaming.

June Gallagher is a New York artist who has had an affinity for the fantastic ever since she was a child.

Like myself, she turned to other artists to fuel her creativity, spending much time in her youth getting lost in fantasy illustrations. She’s also a fan of one of my favorite and most influential artists, Arthur Rackham.

Years later, June’s love for Rackham’s enchanting illustrations led her to Arthur Spiderwick’s findings in The Spiderwick Chronicles.  In fact, she even chose Thimbletack as her inspiration for an awesome polymer clay sculpture.

This wasn’t the first time June had turned to Thimbletack for artistic inspiration, she had sculpted the brownie 10 years prior but lost the original in an accidental fall.  Although the sculpture’s break was a sad loss for her it turned out to be more of a motivator to test her artistic skills and take her craftsmanship to the next level.

“Recently, I had been wondering if my skills had been improving and pushing myself to do better. Out of the blue, Thimbletack for no apparent reason, fell off the bookshelf and broke irreparably. House felt empty with out him, so I sculpted a new one.” June explained.

June’s Thimbletack is a multi-media work of art consisting mainly of Sculpey’s Premo polymer clay, dressed with feathers for his hair, leather for his hat & suspenders, and a man’s dress sock for his pants, all delicately put together and mounted on a wooden base.  It took June about a month to finish her final sculpt with much of that time spent finding the mixed media accents.

Excellent work, June!  I’m glad you took the time to bring another Thimbletack to life.  It really looks like he could walk right off that wooden mount taking Jeffrey and Lemondrop with him.

Keep sculpting. Keep dreaming. Keep creating.

Entertainment Weekly has the exclusive reveal of the redesigned jackets for the first five books in The Spiderwick Chronicles.

You may remember following along in my process last fall as I returned to rendering Jared, Simon and Mallory Grace along with some favorite fairy folk. This May, the books will be re-released in a larger format hardcover edition as well as paperback for the first time.

BTW, the yellow seen in this jpeg will be printed as gold foil (as seen below). You can see all five of the new covers on Entertainment Weekly’s site, here.

And speaking of Entertainment Weekly, I did a quick editorial illustration for their new geek blog, CapeTown, celebrating a favorite director of mine who is dashing off to a galaxy far, far away. Enjoy!

Though I am dying to dive back into the writing of WondLa III, I have diverted my attention to a certain trio of siblings and their encounters with the fey-folk.

Next May, The Spiderwick Chronicles will be celebrating its 10-year anniversary(!) For this milestone, I am redesigning and illustrating new jackets for the original five books. Though I can’t reveal the finished artwork just yet, I can share some snapshots of my progress:

Back when I originally illustrated the chapter books, I created a reference model sheet of head shots so that I could keep the main character’s features consistent. This came in handy when I returned to drawing the Grace kids once again. Above, the rough sketch has been traced onto Bristol board using a light table.

Since I have drawn these characters numerous times, I can usually render them fairly accurately out of my head. However, I still used reference for their poses to get aspects of the anatomy and details correct. All this sketch work is done in a #2 Ticonderoga pencil.

The style of art for these is a special mix of turn-of-the-century illustration, comic books and 2D animation. I never want it to veer too close to any one of these styles so it is a bit of an artistic balancing act. There are no rules per say, I’m just going on instinct as to whether the drawing “looks right”. As I did back in 2002, all images are inked using a Hunts 102 nib and sepia FW ink.

Some of the fairy fauna are adorned in plant material. I drew from leaves, grass and weeds plucked from our backyard to get the details just right.

Its not always smooth sailing, especially with ink drawings. The Green-Eyed Elf maiden (from Lucinda’s Secret) didn’t quite come out to my liking the first go-around. I drew up another head and replaced the first one using Photoshop. In 2002, she would have been carefully cut out then glued on as a patch to the original ink drawing.

Some elements, like these bio-luminescent mushrooms, were inked separately on a sheet of vellum. I planned on using a different color for their inked line and having the art separated makes this much more convenient when it comes time to tint it.

In fact, I utilized an artistic process for these pieces that I had been experimenting with for some time. I painted a acrylic paint wash on a transparent sheet of marker paper laid over the finished ink drawing. In Photoshop I merged these elements, along with some stained antique paper, to use as my underpainting for the finished illustration. Though the elements are combined digitally, at this point all are created traditionally.

However, the local color was flatted in using Photoshop. Having the color as a separate element allows me incredible freedom to explore various palettes for the five book jackets.

I’ll go into more detail on just how I combined all these elements next time. In the meantime, I’ve been tweeting and posting these snapshots on my Facebook and Instagram page, so stop by and check out additional pics. Seeya there.

It’s been an art-filled week here in DiTerlizziland reviewing entries for the Wonders of the Future WondLa Giveaway; so for this weeks FFA I’d like to come back from the future to take a look at the fantastic.

Like me, French art student, Joelle, has a love for faeries, hobgoblins, and other denizens of the Invisible World.  For inspiration, Joelle to turn to her copy of Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You for her school assignment: “sculpte-moi une histoire” or “to carve me a story”.

And Joelle did just that!  Here, she has sculpted and hand-painted characters from the Field Guide, each striking poses of personality.  I love the ogre! You did an awesome job, Joelle…

Keep Sculpting, Keep Dreaming!

(*Parents, teachers: This week’s FFA involves a naturalistic depiction of a mermaid. Thus, she wears no seashell-bikini.)

I’ve seen lots of wonderful submissions for Friday Fan Art over the years. Each time a drawing, painting or sculpture arrives in my studio inbox, I am over the moon with joy that my work has inspired others. However, every once and awhile something comes in that completely BLOWS MY MIND.

Gilberto Magno is a CG artist working in São Paulo, Brazil. His portfolio exhibits many artistic styles, but what he excels at is digital 3D rendering.

This is the detail of a CG model of a Caribbean Mermaid from Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide.  Think that’s amazing? take a look at the rest of it.

…and here is the model painted.

Gilbert even placed the model in an undersea setting, creating a convincing lifelike illustration.

Having seen the CG models used for the Spiderwick film, I can tell you that Gilbert’s work is right up there with the best in the business. His attention to detail and understanding of various shapes and forms has created a stunning interpretation of the mermaid. If these jpegs weren’t enough, check out this little video he created:

Keep up the fabulous work, Gilberto. I can’t wait to see your name in the credits of the next blockbuster film.

Keep dreaming, keep drawing.

I am happy to tell you that all sketches for the interior art for Hero for WondLa are complete and I am now inking them like a madman. The art production will take me into the end of January after which the book will be ready to send off to the printer…and just in time for its May release.

As I read through the manuscript with my illustrator’s hat on, I realized that with WondLa I am often faced with the same dilemma I had with the Spiderwick books – What image do I draw? What scene or action is the right one to illustrate? How can I present the story to the best of my abilities?

My general rule when illustrating the chapter images in a novel is to render the most exciting scene from the chapter without giving away too much. I want to entice the reader to keep going, turn the page, read just one more chapter, before they put the book down. Sometimes I pull it off, sometimes I don’t. It is a tough balancing act.

I know what you’re thinking, “Why not illustrate the scenes in chronological order? Why not illustrate the opening passage of the chapter?” Because often I find those passages are not that exciting. Usually, the opening lines of a chapter are a setup leading to a turning point in the plot contained somewhere later in the chapter. If I were only to illustrate opening lines, you would not have gotten this in chapter 32 of The Search for WondLa:

…instead, you would have seen an illustration of Eva reuniting with Muthr in the Royal Museum of Solas. Sure, it would have been a nice emotional moment, but you wouldn’t see how menacing the pillar guards are. Besides, this was one of the first sketches I did for the book. I couldn’t wait to finish it. This leads me to my first rule of thumb on choosing a scene to illustrate:

If I think its cool, chances are the reader will too.

Let me elaborate: If I am excited to draw something, that enthusiasm is going to come through in the work. I’ll put in the extra effort to render it to the best of my ability and hopefully the reader will respond positively. Of course, there are other reasons for choosing a particular scene to illustrate. Here are some of my determining factors:

Reader Comprehension – An author can spend pages describing what a scene looks like, (sometimes bringing the story to screeching halt) or simply show what something looks like. This approach is used in my picture books and I have adopted it into my middle-grade novel illustration. It has helped especially in complicated, otherworldly things in WondLa, like the towers of Lacus (as seen above). I want my younger readers to enjoy the story and not have to labor too hard over the text.

Elaborate on a Point – Sometimes I want emphasis on something in the text

Happy lucky Friday my fantastic friends!  For this week’s post, we’ve got a special Friday Fan Art delight from a very talented fan, Ray.  Ray has sent us an image all the way from Peru! He has been inspired by some of the artwork found in Arthur Spiderwick’s Guide to the Fantastical World Around You and has presented us with a unique rendition and character design of a “Baby Mandrake.”

The Mandrake species is a favorite of Ray’s and he has interpreted this deadly member of nightshade family with youthful features and a fateful bite. Ray has chosen Gouache as his medium for his Mandrake creation (and has done an awesome job using it!)  As I mentioned, Mandrakes members of the Nightshade family and is a root-like plant with strange bifurcations that often resemble human forms.  Perhaps this is where Ray got some of his inspiration.

Love your work Ray, thanks for sending it along.  Keep drawing, keep dreaming!

For all my UK fans, the latest issue of Pokémon World magazine has a free Spiderwick book in it!

Goblins Attack contains the first few chapters of book 2 of the series, The Seeing Stone, and a “Lost Chapter” which explains how Thimbletack became a boggart. It is similar to the free book given away during the General Mills promotion a few years back.

This freebie is in conjunction with the release of The Spiderwick Chronicles in paperback in the UK. For those who missed the series when it first debuted almost ten years ago, now’s your chance to enjoy the stories at an affordable price.

Gotta catch’em all!

For this week’s Friday Fan Art addition, where we have some lovely drawings by the very talented Elly from Canada.  Besides being a gifted artist, Elly has ambitions to be an aspiring young author and has been plugging away writing books.  Oh, and did I mention that this creative machine is just 8 years old?  Yep that’s right, check out this variety pack of drawings from some of Elly’s favorite books:  The Search for WondLa, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Kenny and the Dragon, and Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guided to the Fantastical World Around You.  Thanks for being such a big fan Elly, you rock! 

Here’s our beloved friend Rovender Kitt from The Search for WondLa.  Look’s like he’s ready to travel…

Check out this rendition of Grahame, the brainy dragon from Kenny & the Dragon.  Is he reading one of your books Elly?

Elly mentioned that she chose to be Jared Grace from The Spiderwick Chronicles for her school’s “Book Character Dress-up Day.” I wanna come!

Knock out drawing of Knocker Elly.  Definitely would NOT mess with this guy….

Keep up the hard work Elly, at this rate I’m certain you’ll succeed with your creative talents.  Keep drawing, keep dreaming!

For all of you Spiderwick movie fans out there, I have a special announcement:  The lovely Sarah Bolger will join yours truly at two London book signings THIS WEEKEND. Here are the details:

Sarah has agreed to sign books and movie memorabilia along with me, so dust off your old Spiderwick collection and we’ll see you this weekend!

To see the rest of the dates on my UK tour, go here.

Dragons, trolls, nixies, mermaids, giants and fairies. I could be talking about Spiderwick, Brian Froud & Alan Lee’s Faeries, or perhaps this is (yet another) post on old D&D. But, in fact, I am referring to the collection of twelve colored fairy books collected and translated over 100 years ago by Scottish novelist, Andrew Lang, and illustrated by English inkmaster, Henry Justice Ford.

This collection of fairy tales from around the world was a favorite in the DiTerlizzi household when I was a kid. We could pick any color book we wanted (there was The Red Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Lilac Fairy Book…you get the idea) and my mom would read stories from them to us at bedtime. In later years, I would attempt to copy Ford’s intricate linework and design. His sense of composition and iconic illustration style certainly had an impact on me, especially on the Spiderwick chapter book illustrations.

Never heard of H.J. Ford? Most probably have not. Its odd how his legacy is eclipsed by contemporaries of his time such as Arthur Rackham or Ernest Shepard – both of whom I am sure were looking at his work. However, in Ford’s art you can see the influence of the Pre-Raphealites more so than say, Rackham’s, and I like that. Its as if he were the illustrator equivalent to John Everett Millais or Edward Burne-Jones. His black & white imagery is of danger and drama, mixed with beauty and youth, against that lush English landscape.

There is no question that Ford’s art inspired illustrators working today. Michael Hague cites him as an influence and has collected first editions of all the colored fairy books (so jealous). I would even venture a bet that up-and-comer, Jeremy Bastian, has Ford’s blood pumping through ink-filled veins of awesomeness, especially in his comic, Cursed Pirate Girl.

Thanks to all my awesome fans overseas, I will be traveling to the United Kingdom this September for another WondLAful tour!  This time I’ll be promoting The Search for WondLa and The Spiderwick Chronicles.  We have planned a couple of surprise guests at some of the venues (including Chris Riddell!), so tune in for more updates. In the meantime, here are the tour dates and locations we have booked so far:

This week we received some wonderful drawings from Allie who lives near us in Massachusetts.  Allie is a fan of The Spiderwick Chronicles as well as The Search for WondLa. In fact, she tells us that she looks just like Eva Nine!!!  What do you think?

Check out Mallory fighting Red Cap!!  I think Mallory is going to win…

…and here’s a “Hoglin”.   I’m guessing it’s a type of hot-dog-goblin.  Any thoughts? It sort of looks delicious…

Great drawings Allie!  Keep drawing, keep dreaming…

I hope everyone had a fabulous Fourth of July. I took a weekend off from WondLa 2 and enjoyed some food, fireworks and finding fireflies. Also, I uploaded all sorts of DiTerlizzi-themed downloads to the site. If you read about each title under the BOOKS section, you’ll now find lots of cool FREE stuff, like audio samples from my various audio books (read by the likes of Mark Hamill, Alan Cumming, Andrew McCarthy and the lovely Teri Hatcher), as well as a plethora of coloring pages and activity sheets for use at home or in the classroom.

I have some favorites, of course, such as make-your-own “Ted’s Birthday Hat” (where you have to write the name of your imaginary friend on it).

(click image for a hi-res file)

…and some holiday images, which I created specifically for crafting flat ornaments to decorate your home, presents or Christmas tree. (In fact,  I should create some new images this year…perhaps Kenny, Grahame and company?)

(click image for a hi-res file)

…there is even a “Color-n-Make” set of puppets from The Spider & The Fly where you can create jointed paper dolls of Mr. Spider, Ms. Fly and the ghost bugs!

(click image for a hi-res file)

…and, since there was no appropriate place for these, here is a set of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons player-character sheets designed and decorated by yours truly for use on your next adventure (click for that hi-res image). Have fun!

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