How to Illustrate a Picture Book: Creating the Drawings

hello my name is Lynne Chapman and I'm a children's book illustrator and I'm halfway through a project right now so I thought it might be quite interesting to talk to you about how I create the drawings and design the book the project's called the jungle grumble and it's written by Julia Jarmon who's an author I work with quite a lot and how it starts off is the publisher or send me just an email with the basic text and that's how I decide if I want to do the book and then if I say yes I'm I'm interested what I do is I sort of go through that text sort of making notes out sort of things that I think about how whether for instance and the way it's broken into spreads is something that I think will work or whether as in this case I'm going to sort of adjust it a little bit and move the words around inside the book they want to do is ask the publisher to set the text in the fault that they're choosing at the size that it's actually going to be because one of the things that's really important when you're drawing an illustration is you have to leave enough space for the words so this isn't it time for some of the text so that's the actual size that it's going to be printed in the book so what I can then do is scan this into my computer and use it to help me to design spreads that I know now that that page is going to have Texas that kind of size so I used to start when I was illustrating a book by taking great new pieces of paper the size that the book was actually going to be and just drawing and seeing what happens and I feel comfortable with that because it gives me the opportunity to sort of draw detail and draw facial expressions of body language which are things that I think make my illustrations work well but on this particular book I've got quite a tight deadline so I thought how can I make slightly quicker so I decided to try out a system working first of all with thumbnails which I know a lot of other strikers do so I started off taking one spread of time and just drawing a tiny little from now you can see them here one for each spread and just put it's really quick that way to just put down the first ideas of how perhaps things might fit on the page and I'm using the text that very publisher has sent me to estimate roughly how much text I'm going to need to leave space for so I work my way through the book doing all these different little drawings this is the different ones for the different spreads when I get to one where and I feel the need to actually draw the character slightly bigger just to give me a clearer idea of what's going on i I do another larger drawing by the side of the thumb nail so that thank-yous me the ability to have the best of both worlds so I love the light through the whole book like that rubbing out redrawing where it's not working but because it's tiny doesn't take long so I can have several goes at it if I need to once I've got them so that I think okay that's looking pretty good it may not be perfect but I think those designs are roughly right what I do is actually scan those back into the computer and I can enlarge them at same time and then what I do is put those into sort of template spreads with the text that I've been sent and I can move the text around on the page I don't have to keep it in a big book because that would be just too clumsy and very hard to design around so I can move the text around within the spread and I I use that thumbnail going to cover just things and see if the right amount of space has been left when I then sort of fiddled around with those and got those again as good as I can get them what I do is print those out so that's what these are these are actually printouts at the enlarged thumbnails so you can see if you place one of the thumbnails next to its original this is just this blown up so I print those out so then I've got a full set of the whole book but obviously these are still at its scrappy and some of the designs aren't quite right when you actually get the text in place so I thought I'd show you one specific illustration to show you how it goes through to that stage and then what I do next to make it work properly so this illustration I thought I'd look at is spread number three and this story is about a bunch of animals who they gathered round the waterhole and they're looking in the water and thinking yeah I wish I had your nose I don't like my ears now they're basically wanting to be different and so this is some of the animals or opinion water hole with the thumbnail that I get originally if I show you what that thumbnail look like when I launch it up and put the text on it we've got that now I can move things around on the computer if I want to before I print out the next stage is I take a piece of layout paper now if you don't know what layout paper is it's it's thin it's so slightly translucent so it's opaque enough that if I place it over the printout I can't really see it properly but it's transparent enough that I can see it enough to use the original printout as a guide so I can serve half trace it and haffley draw it so for each spread a totally spitting out paper put it over the printout drawing and then I've gone over the whole thing redrawing it now I'll show you the drawing that I did of spread number three so if you have a look at the original thumbnail that's what the printer look like now you can see the final drawing so it's changed the actual basic layout of things hasn't changed that much the animals are in the same place so you know the lines in this corner but he's drawn better and he's got a lot more personality I've actually taken this opportunity to redesign the way the animals look as individuals as well so if you look particularly elephant he's changed quite a lot its position has changed quite a bit so I didn't like that original kind of way of the legs were arranged in nude so now so I had a quick think about that and read try different positions he looks a lot better he sits better but also his face is very different so I gave redesigned it made him look you know there's always got some kind of personality the original thumb url----' is just me try to draw any old elephant just to get him in place and can you see this little arrow here this is drawn a little remind me where the gutter in the book is now the gutter is the center fold down the set down the middle of the ball and it's really important the nothing like animals faces or textures anywhere near the gutter because you get distortions and things are quite difficult to see so if we look at the parrot you can see that he's well to one side and the zebra here although his tails getting a little bit close is mostly asteroid importantly the faces are all well out of the way of the gutter so I take the drawing when I finally go sort of again as good as I can get it at this stage and I scan it back into the computer and what I've got here our printouts of the whole book hadn't already been scanned into the computer the original drawings they placed the new drawings rather are placed into the templates that I created earlier where the text 1 I get rid of the old enlarged thumbnail drawing that I had and put the new drawing in its place so if I show you spread number 3 again here it is so you can see now if you place that alongside the drawing you can see that things again are in the same place more or less but if you look closely there are one or two subtle differences because while some in the computer again I've got yet another opportunity to tweak things around a little bit so one of the key things that you notice is that the zebra now is slightly higher your foods ants actually touching the water anymore so I've just noticed that up a little bit made him slightly smaller so it fits the space better and although it's almost impossible to see a quick glance the line is slightly different as well I've tilted his face just a little so that his eyes are brought further into the frame so computers are wonderful for this kind of thing so then I put them all out with the text in place with the line thrown up the middle Sousa Emery's absolutely tinea where the gutter is because I'm then going to send all of these off to my publisher I don't send these printed ones either just for my reference because they're very small what I do is email the full-size ones to the publisher and then I just pecker won't and see what they think of them and that's what's happening right this moment and the editor and the art director and the designer they're all sitting down having a jolly good look and coming up with anything that they think I need to change you

Channel: Lynne Chapman Artist

Views: 234,730

Keywords: drawing animals, Lynne Chapman, roughs, Julia Jarman, how to illustrate, illustration, Drawing Lesson, learn to draw, Demo, Drawing Help, art, children's books, animal drawings, designing a book, animal art, Drawing Workshop, Drawing Tutorial, drawing cartoons, drawing, artist, Illustration Workshop, Illustrating Childrens Books, Drawing Tips, animal illustrations, illustrator, picture book illustration, picture books, illustrating for publication

Id: o5DQXg86luA

Length: 10min 49sec (649 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 21 2014