The Steps to Create Illustrations for a Children's Book

Today,  I am the guest of Karen S. Elliott, The Word Shark, at her blog for writers and readers. I discuss my path to becoming a book designer and illustrator and list out the steps involved in creating illustrations for an author and/or publisher.

Here is the link:


http://karenselliott.wordpress.com/2012/08/16/kids-week-illustrator-book-designer-janice-phelps-williams/


Have a great weekend,
Janice

Creation of a Book Cover: String Bridge by Jessica Bell

Note: Read this blog post and learn how you can win a free signed print!

Today I'd like to share with you the process used to create the cover of String Bridge a novel by Jessica Bell, published by Lucky Press.* But first, here is a synopsis of the book:

Greek cuisine, smog and domestic drudgery was not the life Australian musician, Melody, was expecting when she married a Greek music promoter and settled in Athens, Greece. Keen to play in her new shoes, though, Melody trades her guitar for a 'proper' career and her music for motherhood. That is, until she can bear it no longer and plots a return to the stage––and the person she used to be. However, the obstacles she faces along the way are nothing compared to the tragedy that awaits, and she realizes she's been seeking fulfillment in the wrong place.

The topics in this book include: music, performance, marriage, male-female roles within modern Greek society (the setting is Greece; the author is an Australian living in Athens, Greece), rock 'n roll, motherhood, corporate life and work, putting one's dreams aside for one's family, mother-daughter relationships, friendship and loss. Jessica Bell is a poet and musician. A collection of her poetry was released earlier this year under the title Twisted Velvet Chains. 


Simultaneously with the release of String Bridge (in ebook and paperback form) is the release of a soundtrack for the novel entitled "Melody Hill: On the Other Side." The songs are written and performed by the author. Soundmag wrote:

A piece totally dreamy, literally and figuratively, with incredible melodies and a voice kataplitiki over an acoustic guitar to inspire. Emotional flare-ups by Jessica Bell, excellent intonation and expression, and an avant garde philosophy. …a wonderful musical journey.

The first time I visited Jessica Bell's website, about a year ago, she had a mock-up of her novel's cover there, it featured a photograph of a guitar resting in a corner. In fact, the original title of her manuscript as communicated to me in September of 2010 was "Dead in the Corner of My Bedroom." Since this seemed a more likely title for a mystery novel, which String Bridge is not, discussions ensued about a new title and String Bridge was the winner. (The main character was originally named Jane and her husband was named Max. Jane and Max were changed to Melody and Alex.)

Originally, I envisioned a simple ink drawing of a guitar, very linear and spontaneous, with a line that would run from the cursive letters of the title to the guitar in the corner. Yet when I drew this it seemed a little stark considering the vivid prose and pulsating emotional life of the main character, Melody.

I then started drawing the guitar with black and blue ink. Here is the first result:

For some reason I can't remember now, I first envisioned the cover in pastels and presented this to the author. I followed it up with two more versions, essentially the same but with different cursive writing on "String Bridge."

Jessica liked the cover but asked if it would remain "sketchy." That got me to thinkin'…

But first, an explanation of process: In a book as multilayered as Jessica's, I suspected it would take some time to get the cover right. I wasn't worried because I knew as we worked through the process the right cover would emerge, like a sweet surprise, from all the back and forth and musings and questions. Here was my answer, on March 15, 2011, to her question:

"yes, the idea was that it [the guitar] would be sketchy. The whole thing is sort of Picasso-y. But, if you think it looks weird…then let's just stare at it for a week or so and see what else my brain comes up with. It's a process…  …The only other way I could see this would be with bold shapes of color for the guitar to match the background shapes. Sort of like Matisse's cut-out figures. I'll muse on it a bit…"

Jessica had no idea that Mark and I have several cut-outs by Matisse (prints!) over our couch. So, it was surprising when she sent me a link to an image by Matisse adding "How gorgeous is this piece!!!" I told her a print of it was in our home. I then tweaked the guitar sketch further:

I liked the roughness of combining a drawing with tools in Photoshop. Some of the look of the guitar above is derived at by layering multiple drawings on top of each other, treating each layer slightly differently, then combining all layers.

Then Jessica, being a very creative person herself across multiple disciplines, asked "What do you think of adding some loose pieces of paper scattered on the floor with scribbles of lyrics on them?"

I liked the idea, asked for some scribbly notes scanned and emailed to me and soon received several pieces by email including the following:

Now, as we were each, in Athens, Ohio, USA and Athens, Greece, musing on the pastel cover, Jessica sent me the following note on March 16th, always respectful of my creative process but nudging me to "get" her character of Melody a bit more accurately: "…[could you try] to alter the colour a bit. I really don't think a pastel blue fits Melody's character. Could you make the blue a little bit darker and more muddy? Do you know what I mean?"

Yes, I did! The more I was learning about the book, about Melody and about Jessica Bell, the more I saw that the pastel color was not going to fly.

Jessica also provided some color samples by emailing me the following and suggested "Cordoba Blue." (At this point you might wonder what I am even doing as a cover designer, but I liked collaborating with the author who, after all, knows her book and characters much better than I. This is something that I can do as a small publisher. There are many things I cannot do, but this I can do. I love it!)

The official color of Cordoba Blue is
color web: 71adcb
CMYK: 55/19/12/0
Pantone: 7458C
RGB: 113/172/203

I then sent this bolder version of the cover to Jessica and she "LOVE!"ed it. She also "LUUUURRRRRVE IT!!!!" (which might be an Australian thing, I'm not sure, but her enthusiasm was inspiring!)

On March 16, I wondered and sent this note to Jessica: "I am not sure about it…just went and took a nap and looked at it again… I love the body. I like your color of blue. I could take or leave the pages on the floor. I am not sure about the 'neck'….I think we are closer but not there yet!"  Jessica told me again that she was "in love with it." I agreed to stare at it more, but was preoccupied as our dog, Farley, had had major surgery on her back leg in February, required six weeks in a crate, and was still hobbling on three legs... and I was a bit stressed out. Here I am giving her some "mom love."

Jessica, Dawn (her publicist), and S. (her significant other) all loved the cover and Jessica loved the colors and guitar. I said I wanted to "fuss some more." I added black to the strings, black dots to the bridge and red to the keys and bridge. I also added a heart and added a section of darker blue at the top right of the background. The title was reduced in size slightly.

Jessica loved it and asked me to add "Tessa's" name to the bottom of the "I love Mommy" drawing so that it didn't look like the main character, Melody, had written it. I was happy to do that change. Also, I needed to change "Mommy" to "Mummy."

I made those changes and off went galleys to various parts of the world (Australia and England and India and Canada, oh my!) with the cover image above on the front.

Time went by…

Farley's leg healed…

Jessica worked on the CD…

Reviews came in!

I added Magdalena Ball's review on the front cover as well as a note about the CD, completed the rest of the cover and off to print! Here is the final version of the cover. Here is a snippet from Ms. Ball's review: "Jessica Bell's String Bridge is a powerful debut from a promising writer, full of music, metaphor, and just a hint of magic. "

WIN A FREE SIGNED PRINT OF THE GUITAR IMAGE FROM STRING BRIDGE!

Today, November 11, 2011, is Amazon Chart Rush day for String Bridge. Click on the Amazon link to purchase. If you do purchase a printed copy of the book, I will send you a free gift. A beautiful print out of the guitar image above on Epson Presentation Matte Paper, 44 lb, 8.5 x  11, signed and dated. 

Note: This offer is limited to purchases made by U.S. residents on Amazon.com on November 11, 2011 ONLY and is limited to the first 15 folks to email the proper Amazon receipt.

What you need to do to get your free gift...

Purchase a copy of String Bridge using the link below:

Email to me (queries@janicephelps.com) a copy of your receipt dated Nov. 11, 2011 with Amazon showing the purchase. Be sure that on the Amazon receipt or within the body of the email, I am informed as to your mailing address. I will mail you the signed print of the guitar within 1 month; please allow time for mail delivery.

* I am the founder and publisher of Lucky Press, a traditional publishing company. Jessica submitted her query and manuscript to Lucky Press and I was the one who made the decision to publish it. I also design covers for other publishers and self-publishing authors as well as illustrate children's books. My graphic design website is: www.janicephelps.com


Learn more:
Link to String Bridge on Amazon.
Link to String Bridge on Barnes and Noble.
Buy from an independent bookstore using the following link to String Bridge: Shop Indie Bookstores

I have made the guitar image available on various items like T-shirts, Kindle/Nook/iPad/laptop covers, and more at www.cafepress.com/janicephelps.

Jessica Bell's blog: http://www.thealliterativeallomorph.blogspot.com/
Jessica Bell's website: http://www.jessicacbell.com/

Lucky Press: www.luckypress.com/jessicabell.com

Book Trailer on YouTube.com: http://youtu.be/Rv-hRMA0kqQ

Jessica's CD is available online in more than 150 on line distribution points worldwide (iTunes, we7.com, Amazon, Bleep, Juno, HMV, etc). See all points where you can buy here http://awal.com/services/distribution/

Birth of a Book Cover: Norah

There was some interest in a previous blog I wrote on creating the book cover for Melissa Kline's young adult sci-fi novel, My Beginning. So, I decided to repost this article, which originally appeared on Lucky Press's blog.

* * *

I love creating illustrations for book covers, but there are some interesting common moments that happen in nearly every case. First, I have a vague idea of what the cover might look like. This idea germinates with the input of the publisher and author (In this case, Lucky Press is the publisher, so I wore two hats, publisher and designer. Cynthia Neale's input regarding historical costume and Norah's personality was vital.)

Second, I am sure that implementing that vision will be too difficult for me to accomplish. Three, I figure out (well, okay, I wake up one morning and have a good guess) how I might be able to create the cover. Four, I begin the process and worry again that it's not what I want it to be. Five, everything clicks and I finish it (which usually coincides with arrival of deadline).

1. You can read a synopsis of Norah at this link, but basically it is about an Irish immigrant, Norah McCabe, whose family lives in Five Points in New York City in the second half of the 1800s. Norah is in her early twenties, strong-minded and creative. She owns her own used-clothing shop, and takes cast-offs from wealthy women and resells them. She also dreams of being a journalist -- there is no stopping Norah from reaching her dreams.

We wanted a cover that would capture Norah's strength, her love of fine clothes, and the "feeling" of that period in NYC's history. I asked the author, Cynthia Neale, to send me any documentation she might have on dresses Norah might have worn (though Norah is a fictional character, accurate historical details were most important to the author as she wrote her book). Cynthia sent me a book of historical costumes, noting the images correlating to Norah's generation; I also found some costume images, from museums, online (see photo at left).

2. In the meantime, I also looked at photographs available from stock photo agencies. There was one photo that I liked very much, but the woman's face was not right for Norah. I also looked at images of women in period costumes, but they all looked very posed. Here are some images we came across (available from Superstock Images):

3. I did come up with an idea using one of the images from Superstock, but, again, the author did not feel the image was quite right and, after all, she knows her character best!



Here is an early idea for the cover.

 4. Also, I needed to familiarize myself with Five Points; so I visited websites and came across these photos.

5. I played around with using an image of a woman plus an image of Five Points…

Above is a rough "sketch," but I wanted to see how the cover might look with a city view behind it.

 6. We also looked at a lot of covers on Amazon, noting what appealed to us. I was surprised to find how many bookcovers do not show the woman's face!

7. Eventually, though, we decided to see what an original drawing might look like. I decided to use Cynthia's costume images as the basis for an illustration. The dress I referred to was yellow, and had roses on it, but no shamrocks. I decided to change the design of the pattern on the dress and add shamrocks. I also altered the details of the dress slightly. I drew the dress in pencil, then did the lines in ink with a Micro Pen, .005 and .01 thickness nib. I then added watercolors to the drawing, which was done on smooth Bristol paper. (Yes, I am a cover designer as well as the founder and publisher of Lucky Press. This allows me to be involved in the production process of a title in a wonderful way, and I love this opportunity to design a cover. If a cover is not quite right for my skills, then I engage the services of another designer. We all have different strengths and areas of focus.)

This shows the drawing as it originally was created. Although I didn't think we'd use Norah's face, I wanted to draw it. The author noticed the chin "wasn't quite right" (and I agreed). I altered the chin/jawline slightly. Also, as you see below, I cropped the illustration and flipped it.

8. I didn't want the cover to appear "pastel" though, because the book is gritty, dark in some places, and while there are some romance, love, and light moments, it really is a struggle for Norah to find her way and she is surrounded by people with ulterior motives. I didn't want the book cover to indicate a light romance. I wanted it to be strong. So, the illustration was imported into Photoshop and treated with art filters.

Here is the drawing, scanned and imported into Photoshop, and treated with filters.

9. When I was satisfied with the look of the drawing, I then turned toward the title, subtitle, and author's name. There was some tweaking of the fonts and voila! a book cover for Norah!

Norah is available from online booksellers and through your local chain or independent bookstore. If you love Ireland and/or stories of strong women characters, you will love Cynthia Neale's Norah.

10. Still to be done before printing: adding a hyphen in "19th Century"... But this is a small thing. Next, we will work on the back cover and spine, as well as adding in a snippet of this wonderful review from Feathered Quill:

"This is not a tame, peaceful read. Although there are certainly beautiful scenes of corseted females in their finery traversing the streets of New York City, those same streets are also filled with vicious, violent people desperately trying to feed their families. Norah's life is upsetting in many ways and the twists and turns that happen to her do, indeed, include angry people who are truly out for themselves. However, this story is filled with so much intrigue, mystery, and beauty, that you'll cling to every word while watching Norah grow into a strong, courageous, and brilliant woman, who ends up truly proud of her Irish blood."

Visit the author's website: www.cynthianeale.com

Here is Norah on Amazon. (available in hardcover and paperback).

View the book trailer, below.

Drawings for "Norah." ©2010 Janice Phelps Williams. All rights reserved.

Creation of a Book Cover: "My Beginning" by Melissa Kline

The very best part of the work I do is creating book covers…there's nothing I love more than this part of the publishing process. Today, I'd like to share with you the steps to creating the paperback cover for My Beginning, a young adult novel (sci-fi) by Melissa Kline, published July 1, 2011 by Lucky Press, LLC.

Melissa is a very creative person, not just with words but also with art and craft materials. She is a miniature artist and has displays in the Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls, and Toys, coinciding with the release of My Beginning. Melissa's enthusiasm for all things creative made creating the cover of My Beginning even more fun.

My Beginning tells the story of 16-year-old Ivory, a blonde-haired girl who lives confined in an "institution" -- a place where many children live under the watchful eyes of mother-nurses. The children are not allowed to go outside, for they are told that if they do, they will immediately die, due to a plague that has almost wiped out humankind. Ivory meets Aidan, the first teenage boy she has ever been interested in and the only one of her friends who did not spend his whole life at the institution. After receiving harsh punishment for her relationship with Aidan, Ivory escapes with Aidan into the unknown world outside of the institution and that is her "beginning."

The scene I choose to illustrate, after talking with Melissa, was just after Melissa and Aidan open an old rusty door and emerge into a beautiful wooded area. Here's how I did the cover:

I began with a pencil drawing of how I envisioned Ivory and the woods.

Then, I colored the drawing using a technique that works well for me. First, I color in the major color shapes with Sharpie brand markers. Then, I go over that, in detail, with Prismacolor colored pencils (I use no other brand, as Prismacolors have the best wax content for blending, IMO). Here is a photo of the work in progress:

I saved coloring Ivory until last because I knew her dress would be white and her skin light and I didn't want that part of the drawing to get scuffed or "dirty" while I did the brighter colors. Here (at left) is a detail of Ivory once I have colored her figure.

After the drawing is completely finished, I scanned it with my Epson scanner. Because the drawing was larger than the scanner bed, I had to scan in two sections then merge the sections carefully in Photoshop. (On day I hope to have a larger bed scanner, but they are quite expensive!)

After scanning the photo, I convert it from RGB format to CMYK, the format required by book printers. I also reduce it to fix the dimensions of the finished book (5.5 x 8.5 inches) with an additional 1/4 inch on all sides for necessary bleeding of the image off the edge, to allow for the book to be trimmed to size at the printer's.

So, at this point, I have the illustration in my computer and sized to the correct size for the book cover. But, that is just the end of one phase; it is not yet ready to be a bookcover. This is the point at which many designers new to cover design or author's self-publishing and doing their own covers stop, put on a title and author's name and call it a day. But, by thinking more about the characters and story and letting them speak to you (I know it sounds weird, but it works for me) and also loving the process and the wonderful things you can do in Photoshop, yet knowing how to keep things simple…well all these things are learned by experience and become intuitive to the experienced designer. I have been designer, publisher, or production manager on over 200 books, and finally feel I can trust the process at this point. I dislike being rushed in the creation of the cover; it seems such an organic process. Often what happens is I'll be doing other things, and suddenly this compulsion to work on the cover whispers its way into my consciousness. I'll leave everything else and go to my computer (or drawing pad) and out comes the cover; it seems to pour out from whatever soup was brewing just under my level of awareness. Anyway…. the finished, colored drawing is shown at the top of this post.

Here is my first attempt at making a cover using the illustration. As you can see, it is not well integrated, color-wise or design-wise. It just does not have enough "umph" and the structure of the design does not lend itself to the open, hopeful feeling of Ivory's discovery of the world beyond the institution.

One thing I do like about this cover (at left) is that I choose to use some of the "artistic filters" in Photoshop to bring out the edges of forms in the drawing and enhance the illustration beyond my hand-work. Below, you can see part of this process.

Melissa mentioned the surface of an old white file cabinet; she thought it would work well for the background. I started wondering if I could drag one of Lucky Press's old metal cabinets outside and create a rusty surface using water and the yucky snowy weather we were having here in Ohio at the time. Lucky for me, I had been introduced to Dreamstime stock photos by another wonderful author, Chuck Zigman, who wrote The World's Coolest Movie Star (and another book that I'll write more about this fall).

Here are three textures I liked for this cover. I choose to go with the third one, at bottom left.

Below is the cover as it stood after merging the illustration with the textured background and after I added in the title and author's name. Still, something was not quite right...

Melissa had the wonderful idea of having the illustration show through a keyhole shape and also of having some sort of rusty looking texture behind the illustration. (You are seeing now just how collaborative this cover design process was… our ideas bounced off one another and made the whole process seem not like work, but like a creative adventure!) Here is my third version of the cover with the keyhole and with new fonts for the title (Melanie BT) and author's name (Gil Sans Condensed).

At this point, I knew we had nailed it, though some might think otherwise. Popular YA covers may feature photographs and quirky drawings, but this cover aims to capture the themes of confinement, freedom, nature versus machine, and the innocence and hope of a teenage girl.

After the front cover was completed, it was time to work on the "mechanical": the entire cover layout as it is sent to the printer. Melissa and I fine-tuned the back cover text (synopsis) and chose the reviews that would appear. I obtained the EAN barcode and confirmed the spine width with the printer. Here is the full mechanical for My Beginning.

One of the great reviews we chose to use on the back cover was by Terry Matalas. "Terra Nova" premieres on FOX Sept. 26, 2011 and sounds like a great show, too!:

"Kline has woven a rich tapestry of romance, science fiction, and adventure. Ivory's journey through an Orwellian post-apocalypse grabs hold of you and never lets go." ~Terry Matalas, television writer, FOX TV "TERRA NOVA"

As I mentioned, Melissa creates miniature scenes based on her novels. The final picture here today shows one of the miniatures she created for My Beginning as it displays in the Denver Museum of Miniatures, Dolls, and Toys.

My Beginning is now available in paperback from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and through your favorite bookstores. It is also available in Kindle format from Amazon. You can find Melissa Kline's blog, "Reflections on Writing," at THIS LINK and you can friend her on Facebook at THIS LINK. Her photo (by Anissa Long Photography) is below.



Lucky Press is online at www.luckypress.com and you can learn more about my artwork at www.janicephelps.com/illustrations.htm.