Bears!

I’ve finished the India roughs and have moved on to the Russia pages.

Up until now, I’ve just been posting bits and pieces of what I’ve been working on any given day on this project; the following images are a chronology of the first few major stages my book illustrations go through. These are images of the major milestone stages – there is often a lot more work between these steps, depending on the illustration.

This isn’t meant to be a how-to; every illustrator has their own way of working and their own process. Mine tends to involve a lot of redrawing and gradual tightening of the illustration. Perhaps not the most efficient way of producing a book and certainly not the quickest, but it’s what makes sense to me and is what I’m comfortable with. I like to have the drawings as right as I can get them within reason, before going to colour. Truthfully, I could redraw something forever and never be completely happy with it, but at some point it has to get ‘finished’.

The steps below are repeated for all the spreads –this particular book has 17 spreads + a title page and cover. And maybe endpapers.

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