(Part Two, The Drawing)
Creating a picture book is a complicated puzzle.When I’m in the drawing stage, I spend much more time thinking about how to solve the puzzle than actually drawing. I visualize solutions to the puzzle while I’m taking a walk, when I’m feeding the animals, when I’m on hold with Verizon, at night while I’m sleeping…
I like to imagine I am a humming bird, flying around the scene, seeing it from every angle. Typically, I begin putting pencil to sketchbook at around sunrise before I forget the fleeting images my subconscious mind churned-out the night before.
The windows with the lights on…that’s my studio. When this picture was taken I was just in there drawing. Now I’m walking the sheep out to pasture. I brought along the manuscript, a pencil, an apple, and a pen-knife. The apple and pen-knife are so I can give the sheep, chickens, and crows a little treat on my way through. Beyond the pasture there’s a gate that leads to a walking trail at Pine Run Reservoir. It’s my go-to place for a walk when I need to refresh after drawing for a few hours in the morning. As I walk the trail, I stop periodically to make a note or doodle on the manuscript.
Wendi Silvano’s written story for Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day begins on page seven:
The Summer Children’s Festival was in full swing. Farmer Jake made a special trip with his farm animals. Turkey and his pals loved kids, and they were happy to be there…mostly.
My visual story begins on pages two and three with the endpapers. (Page one if you count the cover)
On my first day of walking with the manuscript for Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day I drew this doodle of Farmer Jake holding a shepherd’s crook. My idea was that Farmer Jake would lead Turkey and all the other animals onto a wagon, and at the same time lead the reader into the story.
After I run out of room to doodle directly on the manuscript, I turn to drawing in sketchbooks. I fill up three or four sketchbooks with every picture book I illustrate. My pencils of choice are Derwent water soluble sketching pencils in light, medium, and dark wash. Don’t want a detail pencil at this point.
Here are some of the other drawings that went into creating the front endpaper scene.
When I was ready to incorporate these sketches into the dummy, I scanned them, opened the scanned images in Photoshop, lassoed them out, and pasted them into a new blank page sized at 11″ X 22″. This is my one concession to digitalization. Inserting my drawings into Photoshop helps me with the page design and makes revisions easier. Each element of the drawing is a separate layer and can be moved around and re-sized however I like. I could avoid the extra step of scanning my pencil drawings by drawing directly on a digital drawing tablet, but I love drawing with a pencil on paper way too much to do it any other way. Here is what it looked like when I was putting all these drawings together in Photoshop.
(I like how some of the manuscript still shows through on Farmer Jake.)
Here is what the watercolor looked like while it was being painted.
After having shown the reader Farmer Jake leading the gang onto the wagon on the front endpapers, I thought a good way to keep the forward momentum going would be to next see Farmer Jake’s fully loaded jalopy hurdling over the bridge towards the ocean, Turkey waving from the passenger seat, and the gang in tow. I wanted the reader to feel the excitement of almost being there… to smell the salt air…to hear the seagulls…
I found a photo-reference for Farmer Jake’s jalopy on the internet.
This scene also had to function as the copyright/dedication/title spread. Here is what I submitted to my art director and editor at Two Lions in the first draft of the dummy.
After reviewing the dummy, the team suggested that it should be more obvious that the animals are in a wagon. This is why it’s good to have editors and art directors look at your work. To me, it was obvious that the animals are in a wagon because my head was immersed in their world. To someone looking at it fresh, it’s wasn’t as clear.
This is the revised version of the copyright/dedication/title spread. Much better thanks to ‘Team Turkey’.
This is how the final turned out.
The settings are another example of the many things I work out in my sketchbooks. Here is a boardwalk study.
This is the picture that inspired KLUCK BROS.
Turkey’s Sandastic Beach Day also required me to draw many people. It wouldn’t be the beach without lots of people. So I drew lots of people… and lots of other beachy things.
One of my favorite scenes in Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day is the one where Turkey is riding a wave. Coincidentally, I’d spent a few weeks the previous summer in Maine painting waves and studying how other artists paint them.
This is the photo reference and sketch of Turkey riding the wave.
This is the sketch of the wave.
Here are the sketches assembled in Photoshop.
(I like when Wendi Silvano writes but then. That’s my cue to draw something crazy on the next page.)
Here’s how this page looked in watercolor while I was painting it. (In the final I added a little yellow to the sun.)
As you can see, drawing a picture book is a lot of hard work, and also a lot of fun. Sometimes I laugh out loud at my own silly drawings while I’m working. That’s when I know it’s a good drawing. But you know what the coolest part of my job is?
The coolest part of my job is when I walk into a school like The Upper Township Primary School and see that my work has inspired a whole new generation of budding artists.
Thank you Upper Township Primary School. And thanks to everyone else who is reading my blog. In part three of Illustrating Turkey’s Sandtastic Beach Day I’ll show you how I did all the paintings.