I’m going to keep these annoyingly small and vague, but here are a few pieces of some of the book from the last few months. There are isolation layers, multi-spread colour and shape planning, details of the early life of a few pieces and colour and texture tests. Some stuff is carefully planned, other bits are wonderfully happy accidents.

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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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Here are a couple colouring work in progress images. With 4G file sizes, saving takes more than a few minutes.

(more of the swan under-drawing here, in a previous post)

Here’s a little tiny sneak peek of one an entire page spread – work in progress

It’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here on the book progress. All the hand work is more or less done, save for some fun messy paint texture stuff that I’ll need along the way. It’s all computer work from now on. Lots of scanning, lots of colouring, lots of isolating individual elements (now I’m paying for the sheer amount of detail I’ve crammed into each illustration).

At this point I’m trying to nail down cohesive colour and treatment. There have been some excruciatingly frustrating days where nothing has gone right. Moments of sheer panic and angst. But I think–hope–it’s in hand now.

Summer has finally arrived here in Vancouver (August – it’s about time!), and I’m again spending it on the wrong side of a window. The truth is, at the end of each work day the last thing I can face is spending any more time on the computer, even to produce a quick blog post. So updates will probably continue to be sporadic from now on.

Above are a few details of work from the last few weeks – early bits in the colouring process and some of the ephemera I’ve been collecting over the last couple of years for this project.