It’s been a while since I dropped some progress photos in here… and it’s not because I haven’t been working on the book, it’s because once I’m done drawing for the day, blogging is supplanted by the need to stake tomato plants, to pick the beans before they get too big and tough, to wash and process fresh, huge Westham Island blueberries bought on weekend excursions, to build a new flower bed, to enjoy summer evening bbqs with friends, to spend an evening biking around the seawall… and finally to enjoy the summer as much as possible before it’s gone.

But here are a few photos of the last spread I was working on over the last week or so. I’ll do a much longer post when the final illustration is done because this particular illustration underwent quite a change when I realised it didn’t quite jive with the concept of the other pages, and it’s a good example of the evolution some of my illustrations go through from first impression to final composition.

This is the first pass at the rough – my very first draft of the book, the one that went to the publisher:

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I thought about this particular spread for a very long time, while I was working on the others. This is a thumbnail I jotted down when I suddenly realised what I needed to do. The weird scribble in the lower right hand corner of the page is a reindeer-drawn sleigh.

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This is an early colour mockup of the lower right corner of the spread. This has also undergone some changes since this initial rough, and I’ll show that later on, when the illustration is complete.

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Aa detail of the final tight rough:

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And this is the result of the other stuff I’ve been working on over the summer: