Experiments in Illustration

My goal is to write a blog post once a week, so I thought I would start by sharing my process with the book I am writing about my daughter, River. One day several months ago I sat down at my computer and started writing from the perspective of my two year old, chuckling at myself as I put my experience of her as a parent into words. The book starts like this.

“I am River. These are the faces I like to make: (picture here of faces). In the summer, I walk around the yard and pick up apples that have fallen from the trees. I take one bite - crunch! and put it in my pocket.”

The book goes on like this, describing River’s difficulty talking (although she finds other creative ways to express herself), and her special hobbies and interests (beetles, throwing oracle cards behind the bed, etc.).

This was the first illustration I made for the book:

I had the idea in my head that I would try watercolor illustrations, so that’s what I did here. Since I’ve never attempted to illustrate a book before, I figured that I would just use this project as a way to practice and experiment with what my style is, while also creating something special for my kid. Last semester in school (I’m getting my PhD in East-West Psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies), I got to do a mentorship with a published author and illustrator, Ajuan Mance. The mentorship was one of my favorite things that I’ve done in my program so far. I showed Ajuan this illustration as well as another one in colored pencil that I did for a class. She thought the watercolor was a little busy (so did I), and liked the composition of the colored pencil better.

This was the first colored pencil drawing I did for the book.

I had really only done the second illustration in colored pencil because I was on a time crunch for the assignment for my class, and I thought colored pencil would be faster than watercolor. I was surprised that I was actually pretty happy with how it turned out, especially because I’ve never thought that I could really draw. Ajuan was extremely supportive with changing that myth in my mind and encouraged me to keep exploring styles and see what worked best for me.

Because I enjoyed the colored pencil drawing so much, I made a few more like that, adding some mixed media collage elements into the pieces. (You can see all of the drawings for this book in my Illustration gallery on the Work page of my website). I really wanted to figure out a way to make my mixed media style work as illustration, and that’s something I’m still working on. For this book I have landed on colored pencil with some few collage elements thrown in, and I’ll keep exploring other styles with different projects. One thing that I never thought about before with my mixed media collage work was copyright issues with using other peoples photos and artwork within my art. I started researching that when I became interested in illustration, so for the second version of the apple drawing the collage elements I used were all public domain images. I found several resources online where you can access tons of public domain images, such as rawpixel and Old Book Illustrations.

Here is the second version of the apple drawing and the one that I will actually use for the book, since it matches the style of the rest of the art. I also changed the composition to make River a little more of the focus, since I thought she got a bit lost in the first version. I love the vibrancy of the watercolor and I think it really accurately represents our actual backyard, but for overall style I think the second one works better for the book.

I plan on continuing to work on this book throughout the summer and submit it to some agents/publishers kind of just for fun (if you consider that fun). If I don’t get any bites, I will probably do a kickstarter campaign and self-publish it. I had originally only intended to make a few copies for River and family, but Ajuan really encouraged me to do more with it. It’s amazing what a difference it can make in your creative endeavors to have another professional give you guidance and support, and I’m so grateful for that.

Next week I think I’ll share more about some of the writing projects that I’ve currently got cooking.

Until then, keep creating!