Picture Book Workshop!

Early in the new year I will be teaching a Picture Book Workshop in Santa Fe at Bee Hive Kids' Books. The class will meet on four consecutive Tuesdays, from 6-8pm: January 15th, 22nd, 29th and February 5th. This will give participants a week between each session to complete the homework. Each assignment builds upon the previous session's work, with a goal of creating a complete picture book manuscript and sample illustration by the end of the course.

I will be sharing my experiences working as a professional illustrator, creating picture books by myself and with authors, as well as tips for working in traditional publishing and how to self-publish your own picture books.

I taught a Children's Book Summer Workshop in 2012 at The Center for Cartoon Studies which was so much fun! Ever since, I've wanted to try it again, and now I've finally got the chance. You can sign up for the course over on the Bee Hive Writing Workshops webpage. Space is limited!

Night is Nigh by Galen Longstreth

In my last post I talked about how I first learned to use textured photoshop brushes while coloring Vera Brosgol's Be Prepared.  After finishing that project, I was very excited to try out these new techniques on my next full color project, Night is Nigh, a picture book written by my sister Galen which I illustrated.

The main thing I used the textured brushes for was highlights on various surfaces (for instance the face of the boy holding the flashlight shown below).  To help highlight this technique, I also decided to use the same textured brush to create a rough edge around each illustration in the book:

Since the entire book takes place at night, I also experimented with putting a multiplied layer of blue over the entire image and then using different values in the layer mask to show or hide the blue to varying degrees. Wherever these "lighting" highlights/shadows appeared, I also used the textured brush which gave a nice soft edge to these effects.  Here you can see an illustration next to its layer mask information (on the characters only - backgrounds were on their own layer). The darker the gray, the less blue is applied, the lighter the gray, the more blue is applied: 

One last area of experimentation for me on this book was setting up my print files using a higher resolution Black plate (in this case 600 dpi) with lower resolution Cyan, Magenta and Yellow plates (300 dpi), and then combining them in InDesign.  The final printed book had really nice, crisp lineart!  This was all a good test run for the first Isle of Elsi book which I will be laying out soon.

As you can tell, I learned a lot by coloring this book!  Below are some of my favorite spreads:

You can find ordering information for Night is Nigh on this page, including a link to a free eBook version!  It's a fun bedtime story about camp.

The Hunter

For the final project in our Children's Book class at Pratt, we had to take the text from an existing book and then illustrate it in our own style.  After a whole day at the library, I decided to use The Hunter: A Chinese Folktale retold by Mary Casanova.  It was a great story, and my illustration style was so different from Ed Young's beautifully understated ink drawings, that I knew I wouldn't be tempted to copy anything he had done in the real book.

We started out by thumbnailing the entire book.  I then redrew these compositions at a slightly more detailed stage so that I could create a full-sized dummy of the book.  You can click the image below to see these images at a larger size:

Right during this assignment I saw a Pixar show at the Museum of Modern Art and I was really amazed by the color scripts that they created for each of their movies.  I loved the idea of being able to see the colors for each scene all on one page, so that you can make sure each setting feels unique.  I made a very simple color script using my thumbnails:

I then drew a cover and two interior illustrations.  Again, you can click on any of these to see larger versions.

I have been posting this old work to get it back online after I stopped using Flickr to display my illustration work.  Believe it or not, this is the last old image!  It'll all be new stuff from here on out!

Alice in Wonderland

The other children's book that we tackled as an assignment for my "Illustration IV" class at Pratt was Alice in Wonderland.  This has always been one of my favorite stories, so it was great to reread it and pick out some scenes to illustrate.  We had to draw a spot illustration, a full page illustration and a two-page spread.  Click on any of the images below to see larger versions of them.

I am posting this old work to get it back online after I stopped using Flickr to display my illustration work.

Snow White

During my last semester at Pratt, our "Illustration IV" class did a series of children's book illustrations, even though we also had a specific Children's Book Illustration class that semester.  I was pumped about this because I have always wanted to illustrate picture books.  Our first assignment was to create an illustration for Snow White.  This piece was a big turning point for me, because it was during the critique process for this piece that I really began to understand the importance of value.

I am posting this old work to get it back online after I stopped using Flickr to display my illustration work.

Egyptian Mummification Process

The class I was most excited to take at Pratt was the Children's Book Illustration class.  For our first assignment we had to do two illustrations to accompany some non-fiction text.  There were four or five texts to choose from, and I selected one about the Egyptian mummification process.  It was super interesting to research this process and I tried to cram in as many historically accurate details into each drawing.

Click either of these images to see them larger:

I am posting this old work to get it back online after I stopped using Flickr to display my illustration work.