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

Vine Leaves Literary Journal -- ISSUE ONE!

I am so pleased to share with you Vine Leaves Literary Journal, from the creative minds of Jessica Bell and Dawn Ius.

Vine Leaves seeks to fill a gap that is overlooked by other journals. From its home page:

The world of literature nowadays is so diverse, open-minded and thriving in experimental works, that there doesn’t seem to be any single form of written art missing from it ... you would think. But there is. 

The vignette. 

It’s rare for a literary magazine to accept the "vignette" as a publishable piece of literature. Why? Because it is not a “proper story.” We beg to differ. 

So, what is a vignette? 

"Vignette" is a word that originally meant "something that may be written on a vine-leaf." It’s a snapshot in words. It differs from flash fiction or a short story in that its aim doesn’t lie within the traditional realms of structure or plot. Instead, the vignette focuses on one element, mood, character, setting or object. It's descriptive, excellent for character or theme exploration and wordplay. Through a vignette, you create an atmosphere. 

Vine Leaves, will entwine you in atmosphere; wrap you in a world where literature ferments and then matures … 

Jessica is the author of String Bridge, a novel about a woman's desire to return to her musical roots, and Twisted Velvet Chains, a collection of poetry. Jessica produced an original CD "sound track" to go with String Bridge. She also maintains a hugely successful blog. Just this week, she learned she'll be hosting the Annual Steinbeck Festival in Ithaca (not NY, the island of… Jessica is an Australian living in Greece).  And now she and Dawn have  given other writers (and illustrators) a venue for their work. After earning a degree in journalism, Dawn ventured into corporate communications, marketing, and public relations and currently co-owns Bridge Social Media. (She writes as well!)


I'm happy to say that one of my illustrations and one of my photographs were accepted into the first issue as was one of my husband, Mark's, poems. I'm not going to post my inclusions here, because I'd really like you to visit the online journal and see for yourself what is in it. The issue comes out Friday, January 6th, 2012! Here's the link again: www.vineleavesliteraryjournal.com


~ Janice


PS: Some of my friends will be in this first issue, so it will be very special to me. Their complete bios and website links are accessible through Vine Leave's website.


Angela Felsted
Glynis Smy
J.R.McRae
Laurel Garver
Madeline Sharples
Mark Van Aken Williams 
Matthew MacNish
Michelle Davidson Argyle
Nicole Ducleroir 
Sheri Larsen
Stephen Parrish

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.

Creating a Children's Book - illlustrations

Unfortunately, the smilebox is not showing the captions that explain the images. Why some illustrations were chosen over others, and the photos of the real dog, Spirit. I am trying to get Hallmark to fix the glitch and will then post a corrected Smilebox. Thank you for viewing!

Another free slideshow by Smilebox

Finding the Right Art Materials #1: Permanent Markers

Let's muse a bit on materials. Ones that work and ones that don't.

How frustrating is it to create a beautiful ATC or altered book or collage or greeting card, reach for a "gold foil" pen and the result is a huge blob of goldish paint right in the middle of your creation?

I love gold and silver pens, but some I've bought went right into the trash. Others consistently work. My problem is keeping track of which is which and remembering when I'm in Hobby Lobby or shopping at Dick Blick or Jo Ann Fabric!

I am thinking about materials because I recently paid many bucks for Micron Archival Ink Acid-free pens. One set of black in various widths and one set of colored. Turns out, I love them. They were worth the price.

I usually draw with fine and extra fine Sharpies. I love the bold colors, the layering of colors, the ease, convenience and portability. In my perfect world there would be 256 colors of Sharpies.

My son, Jesse, introduced me to Poster Paint markers, and the white has been a good addition to my marker box.

But, back to the Microns, the .005 size, in particular. A drawing done in extra-fine Sharpie looks good, but the same drawing done in .005 Micron looks much more sophisticated. Suddenly, my drawing looks hip, looks Wow, looks...I don't know...more professional. I really like the results I'm getting, and nothing about me has changed! Only my tools. How great is that.

Here are some examples:
Here is a drawing I did this week of Tyler, guarding his birthday bone. It is with the Micron pen.



Next, we have a drawing I did last year with Sharpie Extra-Fine markers. I call it Tiny Dancer. You'll see the difference between the two pens.


Here is another drawing of Jackie done with Sharpie markers.

Next, we have two drawings I did this pasat week with Micron .005 black and colored markers. "Tyler and Jackie Dancing" and "Farley's Treat Yes! #2." These are also Artist Trading Card (ATC) size, which is 3.5 x 2.5.

Now, one would hope my technique and skill would improve over time, but the Microns just seem to make things easier.

Do you have any pens or markers that are particular favorites? What gold and silver pens have you found work best?