Chowder Rules! ...how the interior was made
When I started thinking about the interior of Chowder Rules! (written by Anna Crowley Redding), I started with post-it notes. I planned out each spread by doing rough thumbnail sketches on a post-it, and hung them all on the closet door of my studio. It made it easy to look at and plan, and in post-it note form, it made it very easy to move things around. If the timing of one part of the book wasn’t working, I took a post-it or two down and shuffled things around. I used different colors for each round of revisions, and there were several. I worked closely with the editor, Melissa Kim, at this point, to get the story just right.
At the same time, I took my rough thumbnail sketches and enlarged them a bit and made myself a tiny dummy (3 1/2” x 4 1/2”). This really helped with seeing if the story made sense, making the page turns as impactful as possible, and last but not least - making sure there was enough room for the text. This tiny dummy was revised each time I revised the post-it notes.
Once the thumbnail sketches and pagination were approved by the team at Islandport Press, I started the detailed pencil sketches. (Can you tell yet that I’m a planner? Every. Last. Detail.) I blew up those tiny thumbnail sketches to the full size of the book, and drew over them using a combination of tracing paper, vellum paper, and regular ol’ sketching paper. Sometimes I drew large portions of the art all on one sheet, but most of the time I used layers and layers of tracing paper, getting every detail exactly how I wanted. For all of the pencil sketches, I did the final composition in Photoshop.
After the pencil sketches were approved, I did my color studies for each page in Photoshop. Using my chosen color palette, I roughly fill in the artwork with blobs of color, thinking, planning, and revising as I go. This is such an important step in my process, and sometimes it’s not fun. But wrestling with color is necessary because I can’t start the final art without having this all figured out. When I’m doing the final art, colors certainly shift from time to time…sometimes simply the value of the hue, and sometimes even the entire color itself … but having a plan in place helps me so much. I know where I’m going and I know how the book plays out. It’s reassuring, in a way.
Once the color was figured out, I brought the pencil sketches and color studies into Procreate on my iPad Pro, digitally painting the illustrations with a combination of scanned-in real-live watercolor washes, acrylic paint and paper textures, and digital brushes. It feels really good to see it all come together.
I brought the files into Photoshop for some final tweaking, and then it was done! Phew!
Chowder Rules! is on sale now, and I hope you will consider picking up a copy for yourself or a loved-one / chowder-enthusiast! Please support your local bookstore. Thank you!
