The first thing: If you are are a divine being, climbing down from the heavens to create some solid ground on a watery Earth, it’s always helpful to bring along a chicken.

The second thing: Today was a good illustration day. A piece I fought with in the sketch stage, which became my favourite in the drawing stage (when I finally figured it out) and then got away from me during colouring – becoming my least-favourite and causing me much pain and sleeplessness and bad dreams (really) – has come back to me today and was solved! And now it’s a favourite again. I love it when that happens. I just wish it would happen in a matter of hours, not days or weeks.

The third thing: This is exactly how things are (except I don’t have an awesome little dog to share my misery with). (via Drawn)

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This post is part of a series of posts documenting my process of illustrating a picture book. The entire series is archived here. The project began on January 10, 2009, or thereabouts.  Publisher, publish date, author and all those good things will be announced properly in a later posting. (superstitious? Yup, maybe. Not too much, though. Just a little bit. )

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Here’s a couple odd bits that were part of the development of one of the illustrations  – a chameleon, two ways. Neither are actually how it finally appears in the book, but the process revealed some fun possibilities:

And here’s that little kingfisher from earlier, developed a little further…but there’s still a tangent that needs fixing – where the point of the lower leaf meets the branch. I’d forgotten all about it until I posted the photo. Now that’s all I can see:

This is what I’m seeing a lot of these days – slow-creeping progress bars. Slow progress bars while files open, slow progress bars while files save. Whopping huge files with multiple layers means lots of waiting. Not always something one factors into the time it takes to complete an illustration (also, do not underestimate the quirks of technology, nor the time-sink that is file management & organisation).

At this point, I’m making a second pass at the book as a whole – stuff’s finally falling into place, though there are a couple of pieces that aren’t as far along as I would like. I’ve updated a pdf doc with up-to-date screenshots of each piece so I can check continuity. My workflow and approach has naturally evolved over the many, many months I’ve been working at this, so there are changes in how things start to look and that needs to be reined in. Looking over each page, it’s pretty overwhelming what needs tweaking, finishing etc. Almost paralyzingly overwhelming. And that’s when it’s time to make a list. The list itself can look pretty scary, but somehow, putting these things down on paper allows me to remove them from my mind and free up that space to power the doing. Better yet, I was able to tick off a whole bunch of things on a list I’d made 4 months ago. And even better than that, I’ve got one DONE written in there. And wow, does that ever feel good.

Onward!