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Released last fall from LEE & LOW BOOKS, The Story I’ll Tell is a gentle and moving story of adoption and parental love that is sure to touch the hearts of readers everywhere, no matter how they came to be a family. It has received starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, which called it “an unabashed love letter, one that many families will treasure.” 

We asked illustrator Jessica Lanan to take us behind the scenes of her art process bringing The Story I’ll Tell to life:

The process for illustrating The Story I’ll Tell started with research and brainstorming. I read books about adoption and collected evocative images from magazines and the internet that I thought might be useful references. There were a lot of questions to investigate as I tried to piece together the identity of the characters and the overall look and feel of the artwork.

As I researched, I also began sketching thumbnails. My art director and editor provided feedback on these, and through several rounds of revisions we worked to get the concept and flow of the art just right. The thumbnail sketches were also essential in order to work out the composition of each page. For each round of revisions I made a printed dummy in order to simulate the flow of the book.

After the thumbnails were ready, I worked on more detailed drawings, using reference images and models as needed. Here you can see a rough clay model that I used as a reference image for one of the drawings:

Once the drawings had been approved, it was time to move on to the final art. I was using watercolor for this book, which is a rather unforgiving medium, so, I made a miniature version of each painting first in order to get all the mistakes out of the way. Then I transferred my drawing to the watercolor paper and started painting!

Each final piece was done with watercolor and colored pencil on 300lb watercolor paper.

Jessica Lanan has been in love with illustrated books since an early age. Besides The Story I’ll Tell, she has also illustrated Good Fortune in a Wrapping Cloth from the Shen’s Books imprint of LEE & LOW BOOKS. She currently lives in Boulder, Colorado, where she enjoys thunderstorms, crunching autumn leaves beneath her feet, and leaving footprints in freshly fallen snow.

You can purchase a copy of The Story I’ll Tell on our website here.

Hello, dear readers! Today I have a mishmash of a post to share with you, so I hope you’ll bear with me. (Ha.)

I have been on a bit of a quest lately to loosen up my technique. If you also struggle with this, know that you are not alone. It takes an enormous amount of practice to get the “quick and effortless” look instead of the “catastrophic disaster” look, so we watercolorists often get very tight and controlled in order to compensate. Of course, there are many different ways to work with watercolor and some artists do the “controlled” thing extremely well, but if you’re looking to loosen up, here are a few techniques I’ve stolen from other artists over the years that I’ve found helpful:

• Using brushes that are much larger than I find comfortable
• Minimizing the number of washes. The entire background of this image was one big, wet wash, not twenty-seven separate washes detailing every single leaf and bush
• Using a lot more water and paint than seems reasonable; enough that I often end up having rivulets of liquid draining off the paper
• Getting to know the paint. Many colors lighten in value or lose saturation when they dry, so it needs to be even darker than you think when you paint it on
• Waiting for a wet-on-wet wash to completely dry before moving on to add details
• Varying textures. I used some dry brush technique in the trees to simulate pine needles
• Painting lots of really bad paintings that will never, ever see the light of day. I plan to burn these so that no one can accidentally find them when I die
• Working as fast as I possibly can
• Occasionally closing my eyes. (Just kidding! Or not…?)

I hope those help someone out there just as they helped me!

In other news, copies of The Story I’ll Tell are here, so I can also do that second giveaway that I promised you several weeks ago.

The post office didn't do the best job ever on this one

Fortunately, the books are unscathed!

Leave a comment below if you’d like a chance to win a signed book! I’ll announce the winner next Wednesday.

Welcome to part four of my series on the making of The Story I’ll Tell. (Read down to the end of the post for the first print giveaway!) And now: color.

The Story I’ll Tell weaves a lyrical tapestry of fantasy and reality, and I wanted the palette of the illustrations to match the lush, dreamlike quality of the manuscript. I noticed early on that the story alternated between daytime and nighttime scenes, and I knew this would become an important element in the illustrations.

Reference images were the starting point. These Ukiyo-e prints were the inspiration for the blue nighttime pages. Matching the color was not a priority so much as capturing the mood of the image. I tied to imagine how it might feel, physically and emotionally, to step into these peaceful nighttime scenes.

Left: "Moonlight, Soochow," Elizabeth Keith, 1924. Right: "Moon at Arakawa River," Hasui Kawase, 1929.

Once I knew what I was going for, I made a detailed color study for each image Photoshop. I find this useful for getting the value range correct. (For those not familiar with art terminology, value is the measure of how light or dark something is. Not to be confused with saturation, which is a measure of how vivid the color’s hue is.) Ideally I want the illustrations to read just as clearly in black and white as they do in color, and good value organization is essential. Coloring an image in Photoshop is such a mindless activity that I listened to quite a few audiobooks during this phase. Then I made a full-color, printed dummy.

I ended up lightening the value of the background for the final art in order to make the figures more visible.

Finally, I painted color studies and chose an overall palette for the book. I wanted to use similar pigments throughout the book, and I needed a blue that could work either with a warm (daytime) or cool (nighttime) color palette. I tried quite a few combinations before I settled on Holbein’s French Ultramarine, Cadmium Yellow light, and Winsor Red, with other colors as needed. I went through a tube and a half of blue.

Experimentation is key

Okay, you’ve been waiting for it: it’s giveaway time! Leave a comment for a chance to win a giclée print from the book. (It has to be a real comment. If it’s about Louis Vuitton handbags or search engine optimization, I’ll delete it.) Winner will be announced this Friday, October 23. And if you don’t win this time, you’ll have another chance next week with my final installment in the series.

Coming up next: Painting with Guts! The final art, and how to avoid being wimpy with watercolor.

Other posts in the series:

• Part 1 – Getting Started
• Part 2 – Finding Harmony
• Part 3 – Devil’s in the Details
• Part 4 – Color Magic
• Part 5 – Painting with Guts

Eventually there comes a time when the artist must figure out all the things that are happily ignored during the thumbnail phase: perspective, anatomy, facial expression, and the nitty-gritty details that fill the world of the picture book. This can seem daunting, but there are plenty of steps one can take in order to make this easier.

1. Reference images

I’ve found that it’s well worth my time to make reference photos or sketches for the poses of my characters. Sometimes I had to be pretty creative to get the right angle and pose. For the balloon page, I needed to draw the mother from above, running and dropping firewood at the same time. I put on a dress, bought some firewood, and made my husband photograph me from the second story of our house. It took quite a few tries and a lot of yelling through the window before we got it right. I’m sure the neighbors thought I was crazy.

Yes, I'm wearing jeans under the dress. But it was snowing.

Models are another useful tool. They can be elaborate or simple. Sometimes a bit of modeling clay and a scrap of cloth was enough to get the right position:

Fabric scrap + modeling clay + bowl = hot air balloon baby. Please pardon my dirty window in the background.

2. Perspective

If you’re working with perspective, it’s important to get it right. A few errors can throw the whole illustration off. I often find that my vanishing points are inconveniently distant. There are more traditional ways to deal with this problem, but since I’m a modern gal I’ve taken to using Adobe Illustrator to figure it all out.

The simple and quick method is to open the rough sketch and draw lines for your horizon and vanishing points manually with the line tool. If you have something fancy going on like a wacky three-point perspective or lots of round objects, you can take advantage of the built in perspective tool. I used this for my balloon page, making sure that all the round objects were correctly proportioned:

It looks chaotic, but somehow made sense at the time.

3. Putting it all together

With the perspective lines overlaid on the rough sketch, I projected the whole thing onto a larger piece of paper as my guide for the final drawing, keeping the other reference images nearby. Here you can see the transition from thumbnail to final drawing to final art:

As you can see, the cat transformed into dad at some point along the way.

For more on this subject, I recommend the wonderful reference book by Dinotopia artist James Gurney, Imaginative Realism. If you’re not familiar with Gurney’s work, he is truly a master of his craft. The book worth a read for everyone, but is especially useful for illustrators working in more realistic styles. (No, I’m not cool enough to actually know Gurney personally and he did not ask me to promote his book. It’s just one of my favorite references.)

Coming up next: Adding the Magic –  Color and light!

Other posts in the series:

• Part 1 – Getting Started
• Part 2 – Finding Harmony
• Part 3 – Devil’s in the Details
• Part 4 – Adding the Magic
• Part 5 – Painting with Guts

Let’s talk about COMPOSITION! Yeah!

Have you ever noticed that some compositions feel awkward, while others just seem to flow? There are many strategies for creating interesting and easy-to-read compositions. In order to keep from writing a super long, rambling post, I’ll stick to discussing only one method for today. When a composition really isn’t working, sometimes I like to turn to math: the Golden Ratio.

The Golden Ratio is a geometric relationship that you probably learned about in high school, where the ratio of two quantities to each other is the same as the larger quantity’s ratio to the sum of the two quantities. That can sound a bit confusing when you write it out in English words, but it’s actually incredibly simple when you see it drawn. I’ll refer you to this informative Ted Talk about Fibonacci numbers. If you create a sequence of boxes using the Golden ratio, you get a spiral:

Image via the Wikimedia Commons

The Golden Ratio/Golden Spiral is ubiquitous in nature: it shows up in sunflowers, shells, the shape of your ears, the proportions of your body, and the form of galaxies and hurricanes. I could go on and on. The Golden Spiral also happens be a handy tool for creating interesting compositions. Sometimes all it takes are a few tweaks–moving something to the left, lining a few key elements up, to take your composition from “meh” to “aah.” This isn’t a new concept. Artists have been using the golden ratio pretty much ever since it was discovered.

As much fun as I have playing with the composition of my illustrations, I also have to remember that each image is NOT a work of art in and of itself. The book needed to work as a whole, so it was also important to find harmony between the pages as well. This is where my editor and art director were invaluable, never losing sight of the project in its entirety, and keeping me from getting too attached to compositions that were not quite right for the flow of the story. (And also making sure I kept enough space for the text to be placed.) I made several physical dummy books myself so that I could experience the page turn and see the images together in sequence.

If you have another favorite method for finding interesting compositions, I want to hear! Let me know in the comments.

Coming up next: The Devil’s in the Details

Other posts in the series:

• Part 1 – Getting Started
• Part 2 – Finding Harmony
• Part 3 – Devil’s in the Details
• Part 4 – Adding the Magic
• Part 5 – Painting with Guts

The countdown begins for publication of The Story I’ll Tell, set for release on November first. In celebration, I thought it might be fun to do a series of posts about the process of making the illustrations.

So, without further ado, I’ll start from the beginning.

Once upon a time, I woke up as usual, had my coffee breakfast, and got to work when—ping!— an email arrived in my inbox. (It didn’t actually go “ping,” but that seems like a nice idea.) It was from an editor asking if I might be interested in working on a picture book. It sounded promising! Emails were exchanged, manuscripts sent and read, deadlines were set, and contracts negotiated and signed.  After the whirlwind of activity and excitement settled, it was time to sit down, put pencil to paper, and do what might be the most important part of illustrating a picture book: getting started.

With The Story I’ll Tell, I was fortunate to have a lovely manuscript. Ideas jumped up in my mind, begging for attention. I started sketching and writing down notes, and created a folder where I collected evocative images from magazines and the Internet. Where did the characters live? What culture were they from? What kind of world did I want the reader to step into? These were some of the many questions that had to be explored.

After the initial brainstorming, it was time to start planning out the book with thumbnails. Some pages were clear in my mind while others were harder to pin down. After seemingly endless rounds of sketches, I sent in a complete set…

…and soon after, received my first round of detailed feedback from my editor and art director. Lots of feedback. For the uninitiated, it can be difficult to adjust to so many notes and suggestions. But at every round of revision, my art director and editor pushed me to make the book into something far better than I could have ever achieved alone, and I’m so glad they did.

Some pages didn’t change much at all:

…while other pages changed quite a lot:

This isn't even close to all the variations of this page.

By the end of the initial planning phase, I had drawn hundreds of thumbnails. The vast majority ended up in the reject pile. In the case above we ended up changing the text slightly in order to change the setting of the illustration. Once we had the basic concept down, it was time to start working out all the details.

Coming in part two: Finding a harmonious composition.

Other posts in the series:

• Part 1 – Getting Started
• Part 2 – Finding Harmony
• Part 3 – Devil’s in the Details
• Part 4 – Adding the Magic
• Part 5 – Painting with Guts

The countdown begins for publication of The Story I’ll Tell, set for release on November first. In celebration, I thought it might be fun to do a series of posts about the process of making the illustrations.

So, without further ado, I’ll start from the beginning.

Once upon a time, I woke up as usual, had my coffee breakfast, and got to work when—ping!— an email arrived in my inbox. (It didn’t actually go “ping,” but that seems like a nice idea.) It was from an editor asking if I might be interested in working on a picture book. It sounded promising! Emails were exchanged, manuscripts sent and read, deadlines were set, and contracts negotiated and signed.  After the whirlwind of activity and excitement settled, it was time to sit down, put pencil to paper, and do what might be the most important part of illustrating a picture book: getting started.

With The Story I’ll Tell, I was fortunate to have a lovely manuscript. Ideas jumped up in my mind, begging for attention. I started sketching and writing down notes, and created a folder where I collected evocative images from magazines and the Internet. Where did the characters live? What culture were they from? What kind of world did I want the reader to step into? These were some of the many questions that had to be explored.

After the initial brainstorming, it was time to start planning out the book with thumbnails. Some pages were clear in my mind while others were harder to pin down. After seemingly endless rounds of sketches, I sent in a complete set…

…and soon after, received my first round of detailed feedback from my editor and art director. Lots of feedback. For the uninitiated, it can be difficult to adjust to so many notes and suggestions. But at every round of revision, my art director and editor pushed me to make the book into something far better than I could have ever achieved alone, and I’m so glad they did.

Some pages didn’t change much at all:

…while other pages changed quite a lot:

This isn't even close to all the variations of this page.

By the end of the initial planning phase, I had drawn hundreds of thumbnails. The vast majority ended up in the reject pile. In the case above we ended up changing the text slightly in order to change the setting of the illustration. Once we had the basic concept down, it was time to start working out all the details.

Coming in part two: Finding a harmonious composition.

Other posts in the series:

• Part 1 – Getting Started
• Part 2 – Finding Harmony
• Part 3 – Devil’s in the Details
• Part 4 – Adding the Magic
• Part 5 – Painting with Guts

I’m happy to announce that The Story I’ll Tell is well on its way to becoming a real, physical book this autumn. I can now share the cover with you (design by Stephanie Bart-Horvath.) And without further ado:

Ta-da! What do you think?

I’ve decided to kick off the countdown to publication with a series of posts about my process and the different steps along the way, from ideas and thumbnails all the way up to final art. There will be some giveaways and freebies as well, so stay tuned for more.

In other news,my  friend and fellow illustrator Alice Ratterree is celebrating the release of a middle-grade book, Lilliput. The cover art is just gorgeous. Congratulations, Alice!

Nancy Tupper Ling (the author of the Story I’ll Tell) has another book to celebrate: Double Happiness was just released and I can’t wait to get my hands on a copy.

Does anyone else have any exciting news to share? I’d love to hear about it in the comments!