Welcome to my first behind the scenes look at my process! A quick word about why I’m illustrating what I am: I’m in the midst of completely revamping my portfolio - starting from square one so to speak. I’m gearing it towards book cover and poster (movie/theater) work, so I’m assigning myself various projects to build it up. For illustrators, we are bringing to life someone else’s words, so in picking projects for my portfolio, I’m finding existing stories that are fairly well known within their audience. That way, when art directors look at my portfolio, they can easily tell if I’m able to take a story and communicate what it’s about.
The Witch of Blackbird Pond is a children’s/young adult historical fiction novel and it’s a really fun read to revisit as an adult. It felt like a perfect fit to illustrate as a cover. I learned a lot while illustrating this and it set the tone for the portfolio work I created after that and still am today. It also so happens that the idea for this came to me waaay more quickly than most, so I actually didn’t do a whole lot of ideation & sketches beyond what you see here. Let’s get started!
I usually start with pencil sketches and move on to digital sketches only when I’m trying to figure out values or I’m having a particularly hard time figuring out my composition. It’s easier to quickly change things around or try things without redrawing the entire sketch. In this case, I had a couple strong ideas right off the bat, so I decided to start them digitally.
In this second set of sketches, you can see I flipped the values of idea #1 - after feedback, I realized that what I thought read really well (the shape of a dress with someone’s hands folded across her chest surrounded by prairie grass) didn’t at all. Making the dress area darker and the grass lighter helped out with readability. Before, the dress area was confusing and felt like a random shape. In the image above, there are only slight differences between the top row and the bottom. Essentially, I was trying to make the grasses a little more wild and organic in the bottom row.
This is the final idea I went with - I played with a light image of a house in the upper left of the skirt, but ultimately felt it took away from the clean shape of the dress. It kind of stops your eye instead of letting it flow from the ship up to the hands.
On the left, I played with my values until I felt satisfied. For those who don’t know, values are your shadows (darkest), highlights (lightest), and midtones (everything between those two). Being mainly self-taught, I actually had zero idea of the importance of values in a drawing until I started the illustration program I’m now in last year. Turns out, it can really make or break an image! It’s also so much easier to work on a final drawing and color when this is all figured out at the beginning. On the right are some quick color studies.
Now with the composition and values are figured out, I printed out the thumbnail to the final size of my drawing. Currently, I’m working fairly small since these pieces are just for my portfolio and not for actual print.
At this stage, I lay tracing paper over the print-out of my thumbnail and trace the image. In this case, I traced the important shapes - the hands, the dress, and the ship. I also traced the main fountain-like grass shapes and the shape of the sky/clouds behind the ship. I then flipped the tracing paper over, laid another piece over of paper over it, and from that, traced the image backwards.
Why did I trace it backwards? I flip that face down onto my final nice drawing paper, take the round part of scissors (you can also use a spoon or a baren) and burnish it onto the drawing surface. Basically that means I’m transferring the graphite of the top layer onto the surface below- this transfers faint lines of my drawing. This way, I’m not trying to figure out the drawing or erasing too much on my final piece of paper and have a base to work from.
I could have printed my thumbnail backwards to cut out the first step, but this let me refine some things and work out kinks on the first piece of tracing paper. That way, I was burnishing a really clean line drawing.
The list below the images is a written structure for my values - for some reason it helps me stick to the values more rather than just looking at my thumbnail.
To create the grass I did a lot of drawing, erasing, drawing, erasing. In the upper left image, you can see I started out blocking the main fountain grasses. I also drew a small test patch of how I wanted it to look overall. In the upper right image, I laid in some pencil and smudged it to create a base tone for the grass rather than working on the pure white.
On the bottom left, you can see that the bottom half of the grass looks kind of blurry. That was the stage right before the defined grass at the top. I basically drew in all the grass and then blotted it with an eraser - this created a lot of midtone variations. Then I went in and filled in the darker areas and defined the highlights and lines. The final drawing is on the right!
On the left is the scanned and untouched image of my drawing. If I’m coloring digitally, I like to get the black and white image all corrected and refined first. Graphite is notoriously hard to scan or photograph, so this helps me adjust the image more to what it looks like in real life. I also made it a little darker.
After that came the text! The author name is a pre-existing font and the title is hand-lettered - I took a couple fonts I liked, combined elements of them and then put my own spin on it. On the right is another batch of color studies.
After a ton of back and forth, this is the color version I ended up with. I wanted it to feel full color while still retaining some of the grayscale I’m so in love with.
I absolutely loved working on this drawing and I hope this was a helpful look into what it takes to get a final piece! If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments and I’d love to answer them.
Happy Wednesday friends,
♡ nicole