The past week was all about continuing to work on the next Bobbledy Book “The Imaginary Dragon”. Usually when I get to work on a particular project, I kind of dive in and forget everything else. I completely lose track of time (you have no idea how many times I’ve looked up from my work, thinking it’s around 10am, to discover it’s 3:15 and I’m late to pick the kids up from school) and often forget to eat. Matthew does a good job of feeding me snacks and reminding me that it’s time to go to bed. All of this is to say that not much happened on the work front this week other than drawings of dragons.
Last week, Matthew posted some of the early sketches from the book and a few process pictures. He also posted a screenshot of the book layout in InDesign – if you recall, at that point in time, there were lots of pages that didn’t have any illustrations on them, just yellow boxes with notes on what it was I would draw for that page. Well, after a week of drawing away, I’m very pleased to say that all of the sketches for all of the pages are done. No more yellow boxes! Yay!
The funny thing about being a book illustrator is that an image might work perfectly fine by itself, but when you put it next to another image (as you do when putting one image on one page and another on the page opposite) it no longer works. I ran into that trouble a few times, which is always frustrating, because you think you’ve figured things out and it turns out you haven’t.
For example, in one spread, Bill discovers a field of corn on the left hand page, then eats himself into oblivion on the opposite page. Our original layout was supposed to look something like this:
All those stalks of corn were making things look really busy, and really fussy compared to other drawings in the book. I thought maybe I could solve the problem by taking out some of the corn on the left page.
I mostly tried that because I had spent so much time figuring out and drawing all those bent down cornstalks on the right hand page that I didn’t want to do any more work on it. La-zy! Matthew pointed out that not only was it unclear that Bill was sniffing the corn on the left, but his arm also was popping out from somewhere totally unrelated to his body. He also pointed out that with all of the cornstalks on the right, I hadn’t left any space for the writing. Adding a white box behind the writing just made things look even MORE busy. So, we had to re-think the spread.
We decided that the close-up row of corn worked, and that we could repeat Bill by letting the corn move across the spread separating the two versions of Bill – one thinking about eating the corn, and the other actually eating the corn. We thought that juxtaposition of corn contemplation/corn frenzy might also be kind of funny.
I was doubly frustrated because I had a terrible time trying to draw Bill crazily snarfing down the corn, but I pushed through and eventually was happy with it. And so went all of the sketches.
Once I’m done sketching, I print out all the sketches and tape them to the backs of watercolor paper. I use pen and ink with a flexible nib, and a lightboard to trace the sketches. Everyone in the world who isn’t an illustrator thinks this is cheating, and everyone in the world who is an illustrator can’t imagine not using a lightboard. I’m a firm believer in doing whatever gets the job done as painlessly as possible.
So, while I’m tracing, I have to spread all the drawings I’ve inked out to dry.
My desk runs out of space pretty quickly, and soon all of the drawings start taking over the rest of the studio.
I only ink the actual drawn parts of the pictures – the cut-out areas of watercolor I do on the computer. So a lot of the drawings I do with the pen and ink are very incomplete and kind of mysterious. What is Bill hiding behind? What is the king waving his scepter at?
And here you can see the inked in version of Bill scarfing down the corn. I like how he turned out.
Matthew then scanned in all of the ink drawings (we scan them in first in case I mess up painting them so I can make fixes in photshop if I need to) – I hate hate hate scanning, so I went and did some gardening with the kids while Matthew scanned everything in and watched Prison Break on Netflix. Yeah, I know. I don’t feel like I missed a thing.
And so, it wasn’t until late Sunday that I was able to get started on painting. We’ve decided that Bill is a pink dragon. It’s hard to be pink, if you’re a dragon. Or maybe it’s just hard to be a dragon, if you’re Bill. Either way, the pink somehow makes him seem a little more hapless, a little less threatening:
And that’s just the way I like my dragons.