Living in Vancouver, one has to make the best of the rain, or one would never leave the house. So despite the wild weather in Kauai’i, I spent as much time outside as possible – rain or shine (the difference being the almost-constant pleasant temperature of 23°). There were plenty of creatures to seek out and keep me occupied: daily sightings of humpback whales, spinner dolphins, loads of green sea turtles, impressive albatross, and little colour-changing anoles. One of the many highlights was going snorkelling and seeing some of my recent illustration subjects in the wild: threadfin butterflyfish. Super neat!

Illustration detail | jellies and threadfin butterflyfish

Anole | photographed in the National Tropical Botanical Gardens, Kaua’i

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating a picture book. The entire series is archived here.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating a picture book. The entire series is archived here.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating a picture book. The entire series is archived here.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating a picture book. The entire series is archived here.

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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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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:

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!

A small work-in-progress detail from one of the scenes in the book – fitting subject matter for this time of year.

I’m going to take a couple of days off working on the illustrations to enjoy a very rainy West Coast Christmas with my family. The view from my window today is very, very green. There are even a few blooms on the miniature rose bushes. It’s very unlike the view from the same window in 2008:

Another small part of a page spread, this time with a Malachite kingfisher. And I’ve just noticed couple of tangents that need fixing.

Another little detail from a spread I’m working on. The thin red line is my gutter marker.