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Sarah Short from the Short Stop blog, asked to interview me last week to accompany an interview with the Jesus Storybook Bible author, Sally Lloyd-Jones.

Here's an extract, to read the rest go here.

How long did it take you to complete the illustrations in The Jesus Storybook Bible?

In total I worked on the illustrations for around 10 months pretty much full time, although I did also manage to fit in buying my first house, moving house and having a baby (with some help from my lovely wife)... There are 180 illustrations in the book and I had to produce rough drawings for each of them before moving on to the final coloured artwork. I work digitally so each of the drawings was drawn initially in pencil, then again in ink and then scanned in to my Mac. I then created the colours and textures in Photoshop. The whole book fills up about 75Gb of space (150 CD's or 16 DVD's!) and I had to keep several backups while I was working on it so that I wouldn't lose it if something catastrophic happened to my computer. Once the artwork was finished, Sally and the publishers had to approve it and suggest any changes that needed to be made.

How did you come up with the vision for the illustrations? How would you describe the style of these illustrations?

I'm often asked this and the answer is very simple, but often suprising to some people: the text. This is where the inspiration always comes from first, I simply read the page and see what pops in to my head. Then I draw it and see if what I've drawn would look better viewed from further away or closer up, or from above (like the city of Jericho in the book), or from down low (like the spread with Goliath). That's it in a nutshell, the really tricky bit is getting the pictures on the paper (or screen) to look like the pictures in my head!

Christianity Today Magazine have reviewed The Jesus Storybook Bible and they love it! They say nice things about my illustrations too, here's an excerpt:

The Jesus Storybook Bible: Every Story Whispers His Name disproves the adage that you can't judge a book by its cover.

Jago's award-winning cover art is a foretaste of the whimsically insightful and richly colored drawings that await you on every one of the book's 351 pages. The illustrations alone are worth the price of the book.

Did you ever wonder what Jacob's face looked like the morning after his wedding night, when he woke up in bed with a different woman than the one he thought he had married — Leah instead of Rachel? Jago did, and what he imagined and drew made me laugh out loud.

Jago the illustrator, and Sally Lloyd-Jones the author, are a good pair.....

Bible wins Gold at the Independent Publishers Moonbeam Awards!

Very pleased that the bible I spent a long time illustrating has won an award, (click below to read more about the awards). This coincides nicely with the book's 2nd print run, which brings the total number of books in print to 61,000!

Independent Publisher Moonbeam Awards

The Jesus Storybook Bible has moved up to number 4 on the Christian Marketplace Best Sellers chart, this is great news as this is based on only the first couple of months of sales. If it keeps going at this rate we'll be at No 1 by the end of the summer (the current No 1 has however sold over 5 million copies in total so it maybe be a tough one to beat!).

As of today the Jesus Storybook Bible has just hit #26 on the MOVERS AND SHAKERS on amazon.com! It's also currently at a sales rank of 433....

Rebecca OUP-US

Scleroderma is a rare chronic disease that manifests in many parts of the body making treatment particuarly difficult. Below, Maureen D. Mayes, M.D., author of The Scleroderma Book: A Guide For Patients and Families advises patients on how to navigate towards health while coordinating so many doctors. June is National Scleroderma Awareness Month, to get involved visit the foundation’s website.

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World Magazine has reviewed The Jesus Storybook Bible under excellent christian children's books in Noteworthy Books (Susan Olasky, June 9th).



via Sally Lloyd-Jones