children’s book illustration

new book beginnings ~ db

| kirsti

Proof!

Dream Boats proof

This is it, my first quick glimpse…4 years after the first exploratory sketches, and after many, many late nights and working-weekends the day has finally come, I have that first proof of Dream Boats. This is more exciting than I can properly express here.

I had just a quick look at it at the booth at the ALA and it’s now sitting on my dining room table waiting for daylight so I can get a proper look at the colour.

Despite the excitement, the process won’t truly be over until I have the final copy in my hands.

This is the first book that I’ve both illustrated and designed, so it is an extra thrill seeing it in print for the first time. So far, so good. But I’m looking forward to daylight when I can give it a proper looking over.

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DB_Origami_boat_black_outlines_sm_varThis 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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Dream Boats and the incredible disappearing website

| kirsti

SR_poster

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So, I spent a couple of hours signing Dream Boats posters at the ALA Midwinter in Seattle this past weekend and met a lot of wonderful librarians, student librarians, teachers, authors, publishers, book bloggers*, and fellow illustrators from all across the US and Canada (and one from as far away as Samoa!). There was a lot of interest in the Dream Boats illustration process which I tried to explain as much as possible, but I also referred quite a few people to this website to learn more. Now if this was a Murphy’s law sort of scenerio, it would be the perfect time for my website to go down. Which it did, sort of. Well, more like became unreachable at its usual address.

The easiest way to explain it is there was a catastrophic failure with the host of my other websites. The subsequent moving of sites, moving of domains, reassigning of DNS’s and other acronyms rendered this site invisible at its usual address – it’s like someone changed the house numbers, and the house disappeared. Not really the most opportune time for this sort of thing to happen – so I can only hope that those interested in learning more about the book will attempt to look me up again and find the site in working order – which should happen once the servers finish considering and digesting all the changes.

Following are a few really poor cellphone photographs I took really quickly. So…blurry.

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Kallie George, Editor at Simply Read Books (and also an author), and Doug Keith, illustrator of The Bored Book, at the Simply Read Books booth.

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SR_CC

This is Holman Wang, half of the Cozy Classics duo, signing books for a very enthusiastic lineup of classic literature/needle felt fans.

 

*[UPDATED: book bloggers! I forgot to mention book bloggers! So important!]

new book beginnings ~ db

| kirsti

Enough with the details, here are a couple of finished full page spreads! Yes – the style is different between the two illustrations – all will be revealed when the book comes out in May!
(note: The titles of the art have nothing whatsoever to do with the book text)

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Lilies & Koi

Lilies and Koi | mixed media + digital | 24″x12″

See slightly bigger.

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Starfishing
Starfishing | mixed media + digital | 24″x12″

See a slightly bigger.

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DB_Origami_boat_black_outlines_sm_varThis 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 are 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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