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Vesper means “evening prayer”, but my parents named me after a James Bond girl–the original Bond girl, Vesper Lynd, who was James’ first love, and maybe his only love, from Casino Royale. She was loyal to Bond even to death. Well, I suppose both namesakes are worth pursuing.

Hilary Knight taught me to draw as a child, in the wee hours when I would copy page after page of his “Cinderella” in painstaking detail. Everything I did was filtered through my wandering eyes; every leaf of every tree; the ubiquitous graffiti in pre-Giuliani Manhattan, the beauty marks on my mother’s face.

I set off to art school at the tender age of 13, always knowing that I’d travel through life with a paintbrush in my hand. It was at LaGuardia High School for Music and Art and Performing Arts in New York City that I discovered new worlds in children’s book illustration and theatrical scene design. After a year at North Carolina School of the Arts studying scene design, I was driven back into the arms of my mother City and earned my BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design in 1998.

Below is the cover of the book Vesper illustrated for self-published author, Stephen Roach. You can use this link to watch a book Trailer to hear from the author and see Versper in action. http://vimeo.com/14677755

Versper Explains her process:

I usually start with character sketches. Usually I see the character fully formed in my mind, so the sketches aren’t that laborious, and I can concentrate on exploring physicality, costume, etc.

The character of Satchel in Satchel Willoughby and the Realm of Lost Things by Stephen Roach was easy. I knew that the story was somewhat autobiographical, so I took a photo of the author and scaled back the years on him to make him the main character.

I saw a kid in the supermarket one day—while I was on the phone with the author—who was wearing the perfect costume for the character, so I surreptitiously snapped a photo of him with my phone, and used it with no change in the book!

While I’m in this process, I’ll be doing loose color sketches of the scenes, not paying attention to my spread compositions, just to get the feel of the scene and the characters in the space. These are hugely informative later as I’m going to final, because they help remind me of the fresh initial idea so that I don’t tighten up too much.

Live model posing is vital as I go to the final sketch phase. For Satchel, I used my 8-year old as my model, and my 5-year old daughter posed for Scump. She has amazing limber, expressive, dancer-like movement that was perfect for a little flying animal. That was easy! I did pay them, I’ll have you know. Kids do need their Legos, after all.