Step One: Concept & Character Design
First we both schedule a video call where we can go over some of your ideas for your story. You will be able to see my screen as I’m drawing and be able to suggest and edit things as we go along. By the end of the call you will have a few concept sketches that we can continue working on later if you’d like. During this time I can work on character designs, or draw a mini illustration for you to give you a better idea of what your vision will look like in my style.
(Concept Sessions can be booked by the hour and be up to 4 hours long. )
Step Two: Design Your Front Cover
The front cover is one of the most important things about your book, after all, you need to capture children’s interest and the front cover is the first thing they see! Whether using glitter or just relying solely on the illustrations, its important to get your front cover right.
Designing your front cover is a great way to capture the style you’re looking for and to get something you can always go back to for inspiration. I will sketch out 2-3 front cover ideas for you to choose from, then from there we can swap around the layout and text placement to give you plenty of choice.
Once Your sketch is approved I will go in and colour the entire thing with the same full level of detail that you will have throughout your book so you can see if you like the style used on the front cover or if you’d like a slightly different shading or linework style. Once you’re happy we can also play around with font styles too!
Step Three: Storyboarding!
Next, we start the book! Once you send over your script we can go over what you want on each page and any particular pages you really want to focus on, many scrips will come written with the page layouts already planned out.
Once I know all the details I will start sketching out all of the pages, sometimes doing multiple variations for layout on a page so you can choose how it will look. From there you can make any big changes like moving characters around, different posing for a character or just redrawing the page altogether!
This is the best time to make big changes and see all your ideas in sketch form, so don’t be afraid to ask for changes here.
Step Four: Illustrating your Book!
Once you approve all of the sketches I will start painting! This is the most time consuming part of the process so it will take me anywhere from 1-3 months to finish the colouring and shading. I will be sending frequent updates of how it looks before adding too much detail so small things can still be changed, but please be aware that once we have reached this stage, any large changes (such as a different pose that requires me to redraw the character or a background change) will incur an additional charge.
At this stage there isn’t much I need from you and its basically all down to me! So all you have to do is sit back and wait for your illustrations to be completed.
Please feel free to reach out at any time though! I would love to show you the work in progress pictures whenever you’d like.
Step Five: Off to the Editor
We’re nearly finished!! Once all the illustrations are finished all thats needed now is the editing! I can do this for you if you’d like, but I highly recommend you find a professional editor who can place the text in a fun and interesting way and can read over your story and help you with any grammatical errors or wording.
When all your text is placed you can come back to be for some last little add on’s, such as cute mini illustrations to decorate around the corners or to fill in any gaps.
