Red

This is a quick character design for a picture book about a girl with red hair, hand-drawn and scanned into Photoshop, then painted digitally. I had a lot of fun painting the hair, keeping the brush strokes messy and loose. Normally my style is a lot neater, which I’m learning is not necessarily a good thing – drawing ‘tightly’ is a learned habit from my animation days, where the lines had to be neat with consistent thickness, and had to ‘close up’ (i.e. join together with no gaps) to make the colouring process quicker. In illustration I’ve found that technique makes my work a little stilted and wooden. These days I’m opting for a looser, sketchier style that tries to capture movement in one pose, rather than ‘making’ the movement through animation. It’s not easy, and something I will continue to practice. For some great examples of using line to create movement, take a look at the work of illustrator Ann James – she is utterly brilliant.

The pencil outlines for this work were also not painted over in Photoshop (unlike Super Nova), but just strengthened and coloured using some Photoshop magic. I think it makes for a rougher but more appealing effect.

Little Sister

This is Nova, the little sister from the picture book Super Nova, written by Krys Saclier and published by Ford Street Publishing (2019).

I had great fun illustrating Super Nova. The characters and backgrounds are all hand-drawn, then I scanned each page into my computer and used my graphics tablet (a Wacom Intuos Pro, and basically beloved like a fourth child) to digitally paint in the colour in Adobe Photoshop™. I used three brushes – a rough pastel-type brush that added lots of texture; a sketchy pencil-type brush with a slightly different texture to the pastel brush, used for shadows and to soften the edges of the pastel brush; and a hard pencil-type brush for outlining, that still created some texture (kind of like a sharp, high-quality crayon).

Working with an editor was a new experience for me, as all of my previous books have been self-published. For me it was the most valuable part of the whole process – I called it ‘the start of my apprenticeship’. Nan’s experience was priceless, and I learnt oodles about picture book illustration, including defining a style, capturing movement in a character’s pose, correctly drawing perspective, and pushing myself to get the best result for the book.

Super Nova is available in both paperback and hardcover from Ford Street Publishing, or from your local library or bookstore.