Valisbinha

Interior illustrations for a children's book.

An independent author got in touch to create the look of her fantasy children's book.

The client needed illustrations that were colourful and eye-catching enough to hold a child's attention, but that could still carry the drama the story asked for. The biggest challenge was making each image match its own passage of text while still reading as part of one continuous story.

The project started with a long conversation about the story and about the character's personality. The client brought references for the art style she hoped to see, so we could mirror it and land somewhere we were both happy with.

My suggestion was to lock the characters down first, building the earliest model ideas, so that everything after could move with more certainty.

The author sent over her first ideas and I got straight to sketching them as a character sheet — a few poses, a few expressions, some details.

The quick version of the creative process is six steps: 1 Sketches; 2 Lineart; 3 Flat or base colours; 4 Shadows; 5 Lighting; 6 Details.

First the author suggested the scene. From there came the sketch, a rough first pass at the overall idea. With that defined and approved by the client, we moved to lineart — drawing the piece more cleanly, giving each area the right weight and clearing the scribble away, which makes the idea easy to read and sets up the next step, base colours.

Base colour starts by selecting the whole interior of the character to build a mask: a base you clip the other colours onto, which keeps the paint from bleeding outside the outline. Then shadows. Here you have to read the overall atmosphere of the scene, because the light dictates the colour of the shadow — or dictates the idea you want to get across. The scene below sits in a light blue tone, an ordinary sunny day, so a purple tint on a multiply layer was the choice, complementing the blue of the sky.

For light, two passes usually matter. Bounce light picks up the tones of the environment and reflects them onto the characters, so they belong to the landscape instead of floating on top of it. And then the light source itself, which can be handled many ways — here I chose not to add an extra layer, and to communicate the light through the absence of shadow instead, which makes the image easier to digest for the audience it is aimed at: children.

Bounce light and the details — indications of material like metal and rock, textures in general, and rim light — were added at the very end of the process.

One nice detail on this project: the author chose to keep every image inside a circle, marking the crucial moments of the story and pulling the circle into semiotic territory as an idea of sweetness.