Formatting picture book illustrations is the last step. The illustrations must be finished first.
“For Love of Goats” taught me a lot about doing illustrations. Watercolor may be beautiful, but mistakes are forever. Or are they?
Creating the Pictures
Each drawing takes hours. The sketch is drawn, redrawn, corrected. Watercolor is put on after that.
Pencil lines show through watercolor, so they must be very light. If they are too light, you can’t see them.
Computer ‘Magic’
Formatting picture book illustrations requires scanning them into a computer as JPEG images. My paint shop creates and works with these images. It let me trim down lines that were too thick with paint.
In “For Love of Goats” I have a series of short fiction much of which is set in a stall created with bales of hay. Painting identical stalls for each picture was beyond my skill. I painted one stall.
Then I drew and painted the goats to go into the stall. Duplicating the stall, I had it for all of my drawings. Using my paint shop, I placed the goats into the stall. This worked so well, I used the same method for several of the illustrations.
Doing these things does mean using multiple layers. The first time or two, using layers can be intimidating. Practice helps.
One important practice is to save all of your original drawings in their original form. When I work on one, I save this one as a duplicate in case I have to start over. This is a good habit to have for any illustration work: drawings, paintings, photographs. It is also a good idea with the text for a picture book or a novel.
Final Images
Many picture books are done in letter size. That is the size I create my drawings in.
However, eBooks are usually sized for 6” by 9” ratios. That distorts the letter size image. When formatting picture book illustrations for a digital version, it’s important to crop and resize them for this so they look right in digital format. That is 8” by 11” instead of 8 ½” by 11”.
“Waiting For Fairies”
Although I created many of the images using layers for some picture books, this picture book was done with all complete pictures. That bush was a challenge and, if each image is looked over carefully, it isn’t exactly the same in all of them.
As I look over different picture books, my painting and computer method is not the norm. However, each book is different and each illustrator uses a method they are comfortable with.
