Children's Book Illustration

This was a project which involved illustrating a small children's book using the story and some suggestions from the client as a starting point. The boy seen in most of the images was the main character in the story and was based on the author's son. This was a relatively low budget and short deadline project with much less time spent on individual images than on most of the other images found on this site. This project was a fun change of pace, and I would love the chance to illustrate another book sometime in the future.

Process and techniques

To account for the previously mentioned project constraints I took a different approach to this project. Since the entire story took place at one location, I first created the entire background image and reused it throughout the story, adding snow and cropping to different location as the story progressed. The art for this project was originally done on pencil and paper. It was then inked and scanned into the computer. Next I cleaned up the images in Photoshop and applied a filter to get them all a more consistent line weight and texture. Coloring was then added to each of the elements.

Integration

The characters and weather were done separately and integrated into the background where needed. This greatly reduced the time and effort need to complete the 14 final images required to fully illustrate the book. Once the scene was complete, I was able to add the necessary amount of snow fall to place the image in the correct point in the time line of the book. Various other techniques such as selective blurring of the background help to add depth to the scenes, something that would be difficult to achieve working exclusively in traditional media.

Custom Illustrations

I hope you have enjoyed these examples and please be sure to check out my gallery for more illustrations. If you have any need for your own custom illustrations, be it one image or many, please email me or call for a quote.