Kathleen Kemly has wanted to illustrate children’s books since she was in third grade. She grew up in Michigan and studied illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York. She is the Illustrator of many award winning books. Kathleen works in pastels, oils and pencil and has exhibited her pastel paintings in Seattle. She has worked with children as an artist in residence for middle school students and enjoys visiting schools and talking to children about illustration and creating characters.

Ms. Kemly is a member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and a recipient of the Seattle Arts Council Arts in Education Grant. She lives in Seattle with her husband and two grown sons. She likes to ski, hike in the mountains and be outside as much as possible.

Above and Below are Two illustrations from THE ICE POND – A Work in Progress.

Below is Kathleen’s newest book, MOLLY, BY GOLLY: The Legend of Molly Williams Americas First Female Firefighter. Written by Dianne Ochiltree and published by Boyd’s Mill Press. You will have to wait until the fall of 2012 for it to hit the bookshevles.

KT: This is so much fun. I just realized that Molly, by Golly was written by my friend Dianne Ochiltree. Did you have a chance to interact with Dianne while working on the book?

KK: Not directly, but she provided lots of reference material for me to use. She was also part of the illustration review process, not usual for a writer, because she is an expert on the history of fire fighters equipment and clothing. Her input really helped Molly come to life, along with her great story!

Couple all these great illustrations and a wonderful story by Dianne Ochiltree, to me, this is a must by book. Can’t wait until it is available to buy.

Here is Kathleen sharing her process:

I like to start in Photoshop with sketches. For a book I will do a bunch of character sketches first and then storyboard the book very loosely. When the storyboard is where I want it to be I’ll print it out and make a dummy to make sure there are few compositional redundancies and it has good ‘page turn-ability’. I like to have my art director and editor take a look at this point so they know and approve of the direction of the project.

Next I enlarge each thumbnail, in Photoshop, to the final art size and do the sketch. Drawing in Photoshop enables me to make changes easily, move, resize and warp until the drawing is just where I want it.