creating picture book illustrations Archives

Traditional publishing companies often control picture book illustrations assigning the text to an artist. Indie picture book authors have two choices: 1) Find and hire an illustrator; or 2) Do their own illustrations.

I am an indie author. That leaves me with the two choices.

cover of "For Love of Goats" by Karen GoatKeeper — What I found out doing this book was to start with illustrating something you are familiar with and enjoy drawing. After that, other projects aren’t so intimidating.

Hiring an Illustrator

For years I did try to find an illustrator. Good ones are expensive. The amount of work that must be put into the illustrations makes them worth their cost.

My first illustrated book was “For Love of Goats” which presented several problems. Goats are not easy to draw. The book includes several breeds of goats and each one is different.

Additionally, goats have attitudes and behaviors. Someone unfamiliar with goats, working only from photographs, will miss these. And these were reflected in the text.

Goats have been an important part of my life for fifty years. I’ve watched them. That didn’t mean I could draw them. I wanted to finish this book I’d worked so hard on, so I learned.

Picture Book Illustrations

If you’ve been looking at picture books, you know illustrations are done in many mediums. They are done in many styles.

Once the decision is made to illustrate a book, the medium is chosen. It must be one the illustrator is comfortable with.

My medium is watercolor. Why? Because I like the way it looks, the way it is done and the challenge of it. Watercolor is a most unforgiving medium as mistakes never go away.

Waiting for Fairies

After completing “For Love of Goats”, I had the confidence to illustrate the two picture books I had written text for. The next one I tackled was “Waiting for Fairies”.

People are incredibly hard for me to draw. Even now, I look at my illustrations and wish I had done better.

The fun part of doing these illustrations was the opportunity it gave me to add an additional layer to the story told in the text. Since the child was waiting for fairies, there should be fairies somewhere.

Doing picture book illustrations isn’t for every author. I’ve found it is for me.

“Waiting for Fairies” eBook version is free through Smashwords for the month of November. The coupon code is LXLLT.

When I painted the panels for “Waiting For Fairies”, I painted the entire picture each time. However, I didn’t do that for “For Love of Goats”. Creating picture book pages depends on the illustrations for me.

My first step for creating the pages for “The Little Spider” was to sketch, then watercolor the main images. The story is about a little spider that goes ballooning to a new home. this image is when the little spider is airborne.

Combining Watercolor and Computer

My picture book pages always begin with watercolor. First I do a rough sketch. Then I add the paint.

As I do the sketches, I am already looking over my ideas for the final illustrations. Although it’s great to do the entire picture in watercolor, sometimes using the computer to do some of it is better. This will be true for “The Little Spider”.

This is especially true for the text. I love doing the lettering, but rarely have all of the text look alike. The computer does all the text with the same lettering making it much easier to read which is important in a picture book.

For this picture book I am combining computer and watercolor images. For this page I started a new page and put a full light blue color. The watercolor image is selected using freehand selection keeping as close to the image as possible. It is copied onto the blue background. Then comes the tedious task of removing any white surrounding the image. I prefer using the eraser rather than painting to do this. It takes several passes using progressively smaller erasers.

“The Little Spider” Illustrations

My watercolor panels are very spare. They tell a simple story. Because the little spider lives in an area with lots of background that obscures that story, I don’t want to add much of it.

To achieve this, I have painted background panels. One is of the ground. It is mostly in shades of brown.

However, this is boring. So another panel has various objects such a small ferns, leaves, rocks, sticks etc. When I add ground to a panel, a few of these objects will get added too.

In my opinion the text in a picture book needs to be simple and easy to read. Personally I like using Georgia font as I like serifs and the rounder shapes than found in Times New Roman. The image has been narrowed for web viewing, so the text may be adjusted later. However, this is close to my final page for this panel. It took close to an hour to complete from creating the background color to adding the text. And this is one of the simpler pages out of the thirty-two for the book.

Background Colors

The sky will appear in several of the illustrations. Yes, I could do a wash of blue. My washes tend to have brush strokes and I would prefer not to have these in the illustrations.

Instead I will use a computer generated blue panel. This makes the sky a flat blue which it is and keeps it definitely in the background with the story scene on top of it.

The same is true of other scenes where I want a green background, but not one to overshadow the watercolor panels. I can add a few grass plants onto the flat background.

Creating picture book pages takes lots of planning and time. For me it also takes combining watercolor and computer to get just the illustrations I want.