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I thought I would start with Brian Lies latest book cover, which recently won Brian the Crystal Kite Award.  I figured one look and you would see why his book won that award and too many others to list.

Brian Lies is a native of Princeton, NJ, who graduated from Brown University in 1985 with a degree in British and American Literature. He attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for two and a half years, and began doing editorial page illustrations for numerous publications, including the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune and Christian Science Monitor. He illustrated his first children’s book for Houghton Mifflin Co. in 1989, and has since illustrated twenty others, including his New York Times bestsellers Bats at the Library (2008) and Bats at the Beach (2006), as well as Hamlet and the Enormous Chinese Dragon Kite (1994) and Hamlet and the Magnificent Sandcastle (2001), which he also wrote. Brian is a frequent contributor to Cricket, Spider, and Ladybug magazines, has shown his work in galleries around the country, and enjoys visiting schools to talk with students about writing and illustrating stories. He and his wife, Laurel, live in Duxbury, MA with their daughter, a cat and a hamster.

I love how Brian shows us his process. Here’s Brian:

In setting up a scene, I draw from imagination, but bring in research. For Bats at the Library, I wanted the setting to be my favorite library building, the Riverside (IL) Public Library, in the town where my Dad grew up. I live in Massachusetts, and hadn’t seen the library in the 28 years since my grandparents died, so I flew to Chicago and spent three days in the library, taking over 300 photos, doing detailed drawings of the building, and working on revisions, with an eye to having the feel of the building infuse the writing. I’m not slavish about copying from reference photos—I don’t set up a complete scene and then just copy it. But I like to get details right—that helps readers slip into the world I’m trying to create—and so lots of different elements I’ve seen will find themselves in a drawing I do after the research. When I visit schools, I talk about using unusual, specific details in both writing and artwork to create a feeling of reality within a story. A car in the driveway is dull; a blood-red convertible with ivory seats and a broken headlight awakens the brain and draws you into the storyteller’s voice.

Brian’s final sketch. When I’m working on a book, I get feedback on my sketches from the art director. He may have some production concern I’m unaware of, and has a fresh eye and can point out inconsistencies or weaknesses in storytelling I can’t see because I’ve been too close to the story. My editor also comments on the pictures as well as the story, and between the two of them, I’ve got a great team to help steer the story to its strongest self. 

The transfer. When I’m painting one of my pictures, the first step is to transfer a copy of the finished drawing to the paper on which I’ll be painting, most often Strathmore Series 400 or 500 vellum surface paper. I use