Earlier this year my first illustrated kid’s book hit the shelves. If you are interested in how a book like this comes to be, here is a little insight into how it played out for this one…
The Secret Signs of Nature was released in mid-May of 2022, and it was my biggest project to date. I'm now able to see and appreciate how much work it was, and how much I learned and grew throughout the process. I'll try to keep this somewhat succinct, as there is SO much I could say.
I started work on the book way back in October of 2020. Yes, publishing timelines are long! It was peak pandemic time, and I was so thankful to have found a project that would allow me to put my head down and just get lost. Even years from now when I go back and look at this book I will probably think about the pandemic and about what a strange time it was!
I worked with Magic Cat Publishing to bring this book to life, and they were wonderful - especially my art director, Nicola. She was super patient and did a great job of guiding me throughout the entire process. The book was written by Craig Caudill, a master naturalist and outdoor educator, and just all around expert in wilderness survival. A very cool guy. It's a non-fiction book all about using nature's hidden clues to navigate and find our way. In other words - it's how to let nature be our guide. I was pretty excited to take on the project, as it was right up my alley. That's not to say I wasn't also intimidated by the scope of it, because I ABSOLUTELY was. More on that later!
The art director and I started off with a bit of back and forth conversation about layout and style, and how we wanted to approach incorporating the text into the visuals. It was clear from the start that this book would be FULL of information, and my illustrations needed to accurately show the concepts that were being presented, but also - it's a kid's book - so let's make it fun and colorful and something that a kid would want to spend hours taking in every little detail. But...no pressure. And, yes this was also the point in which I started to feel a little bit overwhelmed. If I thought too far ahead that's when I got that imposter syndrome/intimidated feeling, so throughout the entire process my mindset was to just take it one day and one step at a time. It was one of those "it's a marathon not a sprint" situations.
If I could sum up the process of illustrating a book, at least this one, I would describe it as solving a very big and complicated puzzle. Here is how it went...
I would get a brief for each spread of the book. A brief is a list of what should be included in the illustration, time of day, setting, characters, text/information etc. and a short description of what they are looking for. This would also include a folder of digital images that I could use as reference material. Each spread of this book takes place in a different location around the world. I was familiar with some of the plants and animals and landscapes, but others were new to me. So, I also needed to do a lot of my own research to familiarize myself with some of the things that I would be drawing.
Next my task was to do a rough sketch for the spread. This was the part where I actually felt like I was trying to solve a puzzle. I needed to figure out an eye-pleasing composition that addressed every component listed in the brief. Sometimes these came together somewhat easily, but other times it was a struggle, and took many attempts to get right. It was always a bit of a relief to finally figure out a good composition that checked all the boxes. I did these sketches on my iPad in Procreate, which was great because I could go back and re-arrange elements, and change things without any trouble. Here are what a couple of the sketches looked like...
The one thing that threw me off sometimes was that I was drawing on a small screen, but the illustration would exist much bigger in real life. I ended up printing out my sketches at full size just to make sure everything would make sense and look correct when it was reproduced in the book. Here's a stack of those...
I pinned them up on my studio wall as I was working. They became a good visual for me to see just how much I had accomplished as I went along - and that was nice to have next to me every day.
When the sketch/composition was approved, I was then able to go ahead and take that idea to full color and create the final piece of artwork for the book. Sounds simple, but there were a MILLION little decisions to make and problems to solve along the way.
I ended up deciding to create the illustrations with a combination of traditional materials and digital techniques. All of the line work in the book was drawn with traditional pencil on paper - Blackwing Pearl pencils on Strathmore Marker paper to be exact. I liked that combination of soft graphite on smooth paper.
I didn't draw each spread in one whole piece. Instead I drew some of the elements separately, so for each spread I ended up with a little stack of drawings, like these...
I then scanned those drawings and compiled them into the correct composition for each spread, using Photoshop. Here's an example from the page about Mushrooms...
Doing the line work first gave me a good structure for the illustration. Then I transferred that back over to my iPad where I added color and texture using Procreate. I really like the intuitiveness of Procreate, and the the quality of the brushes. It worked great for me for the color stage, and because I did this part on the iPad I wasn't tied to my desk. I know you probably have a lot of questions about this color step. Color is a beast, and can be complicated, so for the sake of succinctness I won’t go into it here, but let’s talk about that in a later post.
Before sending the final artwork to my publisher, I did some fine tuning and clean up of the files in Photoshop.
There are twenty-five of these big, full-color, two page spreads in the book, as well as some information in the front and back. Phew! It was a lot.
The very last step that I completed to finish up the book was to design the endpapers - the pages that make up the insides of the front and back covers. This was actually one of my favorite parts of the whole project - maybe because it signaled the end, and a huge accomplishment - but I love endpapers. They seem to just wrap up a book perfectly. A little design element that ties into the package, but isn't really part of the story. They're like putting a bow on top of a present. The perfect finishing touch. I have so many old vintage children's books with great endpapers, so this was a treat for me. I ended up creating a repeating pattern in greens that included some plants and animals and natural elements from the book, and I think it works perfectly...
I’ve been working on directing my career towards book illustration, so taking on this project was right in line with where I'd like to be - but it still was a little bit scary jumping into this role never having illustrated an entire book before. At the outset, as I was trying to figure out my process, and how to streamline my workflow for efficiency sake, I was a little bit concerned that the first pages I created would look vastly different from the later ones. I kind of knew that as I settled in I would get better as the book progressed. Internally, from my perspective, that did happen. I got more comfortable with what I was doing, and just from sheer repetition and time spent on it I found a groove toward the middle that I didn't have at the beginning. I'm sure on big projects most illustrators experience that to a certain extent, but hopefully in future projects that gap will start to get smaller and fade away. And hopefully to the reader, or the untrained eye (anyone else but me) won't be able to see it.
That was a whirlwind! I know. Thanks for reading! If you want your own copy of The Secret Signs of Nature, you can find it here!