How to Illustrate a Children’s Book: Make the Final Art (Part 4)
WRITTEN BY ABI CUSHMAN
In this final installment of my How to Illustrate a Children’s Book series, I’m going to share how I made the final art for The Quiet Forest, a funny story about a mischievous mouse causing chaos in a forest full of animals, written by Charlotte Offsay.
In case you missed my earlier articles, you can catch up by reading Part 1: Getting Started, Part 2: Making a Picture Book Dummy, and Part 3: Revising the Sketches.
And now for my art-making process! And I just wanted to note, this is just how I made the art for this particular book. Depending on how you make art, your process may be vastly different.
Step 6: Make the final drawings
Because we had gone through several revisions in the sketch stage of the process, I felt confident in the layouts and scale of the illustrations for final art. So I printed out my sketches at full-size, and lightly traced over them on another sheet of paper. Then I drew the final, clean outlines from the tracing. That took a lot of the guesswork out because I had a foundation to start.
As you can see, I just used a mechanical pencil on printer paper.
Sometimes, I drew the elements of the scene separately if I thought I might want to move things around and adjust things.
Step 7: Scan in the drawings
Once I had all my drawings, I scanned them into Adobe Photoshop. I made the pencil lines darker using Levels and cleaned them up.
Step 8: Set up the document in Photoshop
I set up a new document sized to a double page spread, including room for a bleed (a bleed is an extra margin around the page so the printer can crop the page and the illustration goes all the way to the edge). I put the color mode as CMYK.
In this case, each page was 11 x 8.5 inches, so the document was set to 22.25 x 8.75 inches at a resolution of 300dpi. This allowed for the two pages side by side and a bleed of .125 inch around the edges.
Step 9: Color it in!
I copied my scanned drawings into the new document and set the layer to Multiply, which makes the white of the paper transparent. In other words, it allows me to add color underneath the outlines.
Then I used my Wacom tablet to color everything in. I usually rough in all the color and then get more and more detailed. I like to keep my different characters and other elements on their own layers so that I can move them around if necessary.
Note: I know other illustrators like to do color studies of all the spreads first so that they know everything is cohesive. And then they start on the final art. That might work for you in your process.
Step 10: Hand off your final art to the art director!
The last step is to pat yourself on the back for finishing up all the final art. It’s a lot of work making all the illustrations for a 40-page picture book! So it’s good to celebrate when you hand everything in to the art director.
For this book, I spent about 3.5 months making the final art. It was very satisfying seeing all the illustrations with the text placed in.
Here are a few spreads from the opening pages:
Some closeups:
So to wrap up, I hope you found this peek into my illustration process for The Quiet Forest helpful. What I’ve learned after illustrating five books is that each book has its own set of challenges, but that’s okay! It keeps you on your toes, and it means you’re pushing yourself with each project.
I’ve also learned that each editor and art director is different. But the key to a good experience is to have an open mind and also to communicate. If you have questions, ideas or other solutions to problems, share them with the team! It’s a collaborative process, and in the end, you’ll have a book everyone can be proud of.
The Quiet Forest, written by Charlotte Offsay, illustrated by Abi Cushman
(Paula Wiseman Books / Simon & Schuster)
More Illustration Tips
- How to Illustrate a Children’s Book: Getting Started (Part 1)
- How to Illustrate a Children’s Book: Make a Picture Book Dummy (Part 2)
- How to Illustrate a Children’s Book: Make a Picture Book Dummy (Part 3)
- Make Your Children’s Book Illustration Portfolio Unforgettable
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