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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

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