Book process - Grateful for you 🍂
It’s spring 2023.
The birds are chirping, the wind is gently blowing through the fresh leaves
and the grass is still dewy as I go out for a morning walk.
But even though spring is blooming everywhere, my mind is in full autumn mode.
The reason why? I have just started sketching a new project : the next book in the More than a Little series, published by Compendium. If More than a Little is an ode to summer in the woods, Winter Wishes a snowy magical adventure, then Grateful for you will be an enchanting autumn feast. I’m spending my days drawing fallen leaves, pumpkins, apples and warm cups of tea - and it feels heavenly.
A year and a half later, Grateful for you has come out just in time to celebrate this cosy time of the year! I thought it would be a nice opportunity to relive the magical process behind the book’s illustrations and share it here with you friends 🍄
So grab your favourite warm drink 🍵
and a cosy blanket 🧶
we’re going on a watercolour adventure!
I. The beginning
This book is part of an existing series, so I am not really starting from a blank slate. The art director and I have built up a little universe, a certain style and rhythm that needs to be present throughout the whole series. Before I sketch anything, there is a happy, enthusiastic chat between the art director and me (we were so excited to be illustrating Autumn). During this chat, we make a list of potential animals together and try to work out which ones might be the perfect pair for the main characters!
In case you don’t know the series, each book has six animal characters, but two of them are particularly important to the story : the narrator and their friend! We usually follow a pattern of pairing a small animal with a larger one. In More than a little thre is a chipmunk and a fox, in Winter Wishes a penguin and a polar bear. Time to work out who is going to embody this new story!
Once I have a list of animals that we both feel good about, I start sketching and painting. We usually try to come up with more ideas than we need, because sometimes some ideas do not look as cute on paper as they did in our thoughts. Here are the first six animals I came up with:
As you can see, there are no squirrels or bears in sight! After sharing my sketches with the team, they suggested some animals that appeared to be more popular in the USA and that they felt would be more representative of the season. This is when our brown bear and squirrel friends appeared! They replaced the wild boar and sheep. We also changed the donkey to a deer. This was the first painting I did of our two main characters:
When sketching and researching characters, I also like to start building a colour palette for the book, based on the season. This way, I can match the characters’ outfits to the overall colour scheme and make sure it will look harmonious in the final illustrations. I also usually start painting some landscape elements, slowly building the base for the book’s atmosphere and scenery.
I started painting trees and greenery without planning much, mostly going with the flow and following intuition for now!
Once the new characters have been approved by the team, it is time to get to the storyboarding phase! Oh, and I also had to tweak the palette slighty since it felt a bit too pink. I added more green, rusty red and some yellow to make it feel more autumnal 🍂✨
II. Let the adventure begin! (aka let’s make the storyboard)
I don’t have a set process when it comes to building a storyboard. It depends a lot on how I am feeling at the time, and how much research needs to be done. Some books are quite intuitive, while some others require a bit more thought and organisation. For Grateful for you, I started slowly with little vignettes of the characters, trying to figure out their dynamic, different poses, and slowly building up a library of ideas for fall-related activities! Chelsea, the lovely art director, helped me there by providing a written list of popular autumn activities in the USA. As autumn traditions can be quite different in Europe and North America, it was nice to have this list to make sure I could include as many activities as possible! I have never been to a pumpkin patch or apple orchard myself, but I can definitely see the appeal and hope to experience it one day. In the meantime, I got to live the autumn dream vicariously through my joyful characters 🥰
In other instances, I had kept the storyboard quite rough to give myself more freedom when the painting phase began. It allowed for more spontaneity when painting the final spreads. However, I knew I wanted a clean, detailed look for this book - it reminded me of that crisp feeling that autumn brings - so I tried to be as detailed and precise as possible in my sketches. I started with loose doodles on paper and imported them into Procreate so that I could fine-tune details and composition.
Here is an example of what my storyboard for Grateful for you looked like:
As we will see later in this article, they look almost exactly like the final spreads. I tried to be as faithful as possible to my sketches when I was painting - and I’m going to give you my trick for doing that ✨
But for now, back to our storyboard! For this series in particular, I always know in advance how many spreads of each type I need to include. In fact, we work with a range of different spread types : vignette, single-page spreads and full colour spreads. The team decide beforehand how many pages of each they would like to see in the book, and this helps me plan which scene might require a full spread, and which other ideas might work better as small vignettes. Since we have a whole group of 6 animal friends, I usually like to use some of the full spreads to show a scene where they all appear at the same time! Other than that, the team gave me a lot of freedom with the storyboard.
Aq the beautiful text written by M.H. Clark was not exactly narrative - it was more of a playful, heart-warming poem - I tried to imagine what little scene could pair well with the feeling described in each stance. This is something I love about these books: the illustrations actually help to add a new dimension to the text, rather than just repeating what has already been said in words. I really enjoy this part of the process, trying different things, researching, changing my mind dozens of times, before I can hope to reach a version of the storyboard I feel happy with!
Once the storyboard is all done and the team has approved it, comes the best moment… time to get my paints out 🥳
III. Getting lost in a watercolour woodland 🍵🍄
Armed with my sketches, brushes and tubes of paint, I am ready for the best part of this process: bringing these sketches to life with colours!
Remember I told you earlier that I tried to be as faithful as possible to my sketches? And promised to share a little trick? Well, it is all about… (can you hear the drums rolling?) 🥁 The lightbox! 🥁 If you are already familiar with the wonderful tool that is a lightbox already, I’m sorry to disappoint, as I won’t be bringing anything new to the table. But if, like me, you’ve spent years of your life not knowing what a lightbox is or what it can do for you… you will soon see how useful it is!
When I paint in watercolour, I usually do not like the pencil sketch to show through the paint. Although it can work very well for some people and be part of a gorgeous art syle, it always feels off in my own art - so I try to avoid it at all costs.
For this specific purpose, using a lightbox has helped me tremendously. I started by printing out my Procreate sketches at the correct scale, and then stick them onto my watercolour paper using painter’s tape. Once everything is secure, I switch on the lightbox and start painting!
Since having a light source underneath your paper changes the perception of colours tremendously, I would test my colours beforehand and make sure they were right before painting the general silhouettes and composition. I would then usually add details without the lightbox (unless there was a particular element I wanted in a specific place, such as character’s eye or nose). This was the perfect balance between keeping the composition true to my sketches, but allowing for a little spontaneity here and there as I added the details and final touches.
From the quick vignette to the refined storyboard sketch to the final painting, below is a look at what the spread looked like at each stage:
As you can see, this nocturnal spread has a dark background in the final version. However, it appears to have been painted on white paper. Since adding a dark background manually would have taken a lot of time and effort, I decided to add it in Photoshop afterwards. Moreover, as I was after a clean look for this book, it seemed that adding the background separately would ensure that the tiny elements could remain as sharp and precise as possible against the dark wash of paint. So I painted the scene on a white sheet of paper, and then painted a dark green wash on a separate sheet before digitally bringing them together.
Although I sometimes use this process throughout the whole book in other projects (painting elements separately and bringing them into a scene digitally), this is not what I did for Grateful for you. I decided to paint each element exactly where it would appear on the final page - except for the dark backgrounds. This would give the illustrations a slightly different feel and it felt more appropriate for this particular book. It somehow gave my paintings a warmer feeling, and I enjoyed painting every single detail in its right place, seeing the scene come to life under my brush.
IV. Digitising and preparing the files
During the book process, I usually scan my paintings in batches. This allows me to optimise my time while being able to provide regular updates to Chelsea, the art director. After painting three or four spreads, I would take a couple of days to scan everything, import the paintings into Photoshop and clean everything up. Then I import it into the template for the final print files (provided by Compendium) and send it straight to the art director for approval!
Usually no changes are needed at this stage as the storyboard, colour palette and characters have all been approved previously. So it's all about enjoying nice painting sessions with a cup of tea in hand and an audio book in my ears 🍵.
Also, in case you were wondering, I scan all of my paintings with a Canon Lide 220 scanner. I bought it back in 2016 when I started illustration and have had it with me ever since. Even though it is getting pretty old and I might have to find it a replacement soon, I have been very satisfied with this good old companion of mine all these years!
V. The end ✨
After months spent with this happy group of critter friends, the time has come for me to wrap things up and say goodbye. Finishing a book you have spent so much time working on is always bittersweet. I feel both the excitement of seeing the book come to life, the relief of having completed such a big project, and a pinch in my heart when I have to say goodbye to these characters. It’s funny how illustrating a book feels like you are discovering a hidden world, getting to know the characters a little better everyday. And when the time comes to say goodbye, it somehow feels like letting go of a friend (I know that sounds a bit cuckoo, but I assure you it is how I feel sometimes 😭).
As I’m waving goodbye to this autumnal world, it’s time to sail off to new projects and new worlds to illustrate… ☁🌫
If you’ve made it to the end of this article, congratulations and thank you for reading 💙
Writing about my working process is always a bit difficult as I never know if what I write might be too obvious or not enough, too precise or too vague, interesting or very boring… so I hope that this insight into the work that went into Grateful for you might have been of some interest to you friends, and maybe even -who knows?- bring you a smile ✨
I hope this month of October will be filled with sweet moments and lots of delicious comforting beverages, and I will see you here soon.
Take care my dear friends 🍵
