I’ve been working on illustrations for my next Milkweed Christmas book and wondered if you’d be interested in seeing and hearing how an illustration develops for me? I hope so, because here goes!
I finish writing and editing my manuscript before I do any of the illustrations. After all, I don’t want to go to all the trouble of creating an illustration only to have the part of the story it’s based on cut or changed.
The first illustrations I tackle are the cover and the frontispiece which together establish the sense of the whole story. Then I start at the beginning of the book and work my way through it. Often, I’ll decide how many illustrations I want in all and trom there, how they’d be distributed among the chapters. And within the chapters, I am careful to not have illustrations back to back. Instead, I’d like them distributed rather evenly, but that of course depends on where the parts of text which invite the most compelling illustrations lie.
In choosing which bits of text to illustrate, I’m looking primarily for interesting interactions between the characters. Then, once I’ve chosen my text, I mark the outline of the illustration on a piece of mixed media paper. The size matters and depends on the size of my book page. I tend to do full page illustrations because it makes the formatting easier, and to calculate that size I need to subtract margins, headers and/or footers, and the gutter (extra space on the inside edge of the page where the binding will be) from the full page size.
Then I think about what I want the characters to be doing and what the setting will be and sketch that out. At this stage, I’m focusing on the relative sizes of the animals as they fit into the scene and sketch them loosely. Thankfully, this part comes pretty easy to me.
It’s often impossible to find source photos of the animals in the positions I have in mind, and that’s because the animals often don’t (or can't) pose they way I'm imagining them. But I can find images of heads that will work for me. Sometimes this works for other parts of the bodies too, like the feet. From there, I sketch the rest of the animals from my imagination.
In this illustration, I added the blanket at this point. There was no need to draw the rat’s body, but I needed to delineate the size and shape of the blanket, and from there, I happened to get carried away with detailing it!
Then I began refining the shapes of the main characters and suggesting the background. If the background were more complicated though—for example, an interior scene with tea things—I’d refine those shapes at this stage as well.
In this particular illustration, the setting is inside one of the chambers of the rats’ burrow with a caved-in chamber at the top left. Since I knew I wouldn’t be drawing all the details of the chamber and the cave-in, I just suggested it with value changes—indicating the dark, collapsed area, for example—and a few details, like rocks and clumps of straw and leaves on which injured papa rat is lying.
Finally, I’m ready to add all the details and establish all the relative values. Because I’m going to add color in the form of transparent acrylic washes, I don’t go as dark as I would if I were intending to create a finished drawing. In that case, I’d use H, HB, 2B, 4B, and maybe 6B pencils. But in this case, I’m using primarily H and HB, with just a bit of 2B for the darkest areas. The color washes will deepen the dark areas further.
I hope this has been interesting or useful or both for you. For me, I find illustrating so much fun! I always like to suggest a story in my stand-alone artwork, and actual illustration takes that further.
You can find more information about my illustrated books on my website, www.KaarenPoole.com. They are animal fiction, intended for animal lovers at all ages.
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