I’ve inherited my boyfriend’s old iphone 3G after he upgraded to the shiny, fast, new model. It takes crummy photos and it’s really slow and it has always hated me – sometimes it just refuses to acknowledge my touch commands. But I still really like the (somewhat) immediacy of the photo function, and that I don’t have to fuss with big 7D files for silly little work-in-progress snaps. Now I can take really bad photos and add heavy-handed instagram filters to them, further satisfying my love for ambiguous images.
Bonus, I’m also not so worried about getting inky fingers on the thing.

The illustrations for this book are equal parts traditional and equal parts digital assembly. I’m in the thick of the digital stuff but stop every so often when I need to create more traditional elements. That requires cleaning my desk, just to make it really messy again.

It’s freeing just messing around with ink and a roll of rice paper. After trying to plan and figure out details so much on this project, it’s nice to find opportunities to work without a plan, just let interesting things happen, and let the medium lead the way.

There are minor frustrations here and there – like running out a rice paper and finding the new package I bought from Opus isn’t the same stuff as I bought before, and I like the texture much less.

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This post is part of a series documenting my process of illustrating the picture book Dream Boats (author Dan Bar-el, pub. Simply Read Books). The entire series of posts is archived here.

View a slideshow of all the work-in-progress images including first sketches, reference material, mistakes, redraws, and tests, to final art at a much larger size, here.

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