These past year I have been working on a very special project; I've been illustrating a children's book! My childhood friend, Ekaterina Petrova, approached me with a story idea late last year and we decided to collaborate. 7 months, 31 illustrations, and 1 cover later, its finished and available for purchase via Amazon!

The final illustrations are done with pastels but the roughs, layouts, final line-work and final colors are all digital. This was done to save time on the 'pre-production' and allow for flexibility in the images early in the process. I thought this would make the final step, illustrating with pastels, very tedious but I found the process surprisingly freeing and I was able to have some spontaneity even with thorough plans. I guess it is like performing a dance, a lot of practice goes in but the final performance will still feel fresh because the kinks have been ironed out and we are left to focus on the art of the performance.

Click on images bellow for some some step-by-step descriptions of the process:

Initial Sketches

Initial sketches are made according to the story. These tend to be extremely rough because you are trying to get the essence of the story the quickest way possible. Clarity is key but no need to be precious!

Finalized Line-work

After the initial sketches notes are given and the tightening begins. The layout is adjusted, and objects are clarified!

Shading and Lighting

I like roughing out the shading early in the process because it hints at the 3 dimensional space and reminds the illustrator where the lighting is (clear lighting makes controls the way your eye moves around the page)

Rough Color

At this point I gather all the pages in one file (so I can see them all at once) and rough in the colors for the whole book. Blocking in the colors this way lets you control story telling by color!

Finalized Color

After the colors for every page are blocked out I do detail work and incorporate any notes the client may have had. These colors are referenced and mimicked by the pastels.

Final Illustration

The line-work, shading edges, and any color notes are transferred to pastel paper via transfer paper and the pasteling begins! There is plenty of change that happens in this step but the basics are all there and the finalized colors are referenced frequently.

Also, I made a gif to show the evolution of the last page, I think the changes are fun to see in sequence :)