For picture book projects the cover art is (usually) the last piece of art that I work on. It’s also the image that takes the most work and goes through a more rigorous vetting process — channeling through the Sales & Marking teams to make sure the image that will represent the book is the best one from the perspective of all sides of the process. I begin with thumbnail…
A behind-the-scenes look into the art-making process for ‘What Rosa Brought’ When making art for a book with historical subject matter, there are many research rabbit holes to fall into (as shown in my post about researching Vienna in 1938), as well as searches that come up dry. In the case of ‘What Rosa Brought’ searching for photo reference for furnished interior apartments in Vienna, Austria pre-1940 was where my research…
A behind-the-scenes look into the art-making process for ‘What Rosa Brought’ When it comes to illustrating a specific location and time period, I go a bit OTT in the research phase. ‘What Rosa Brought’ takes place in Vienna in 1938-1939, and I while I would have loved to have been able to travel there in person as I did for ‘John Ronald’s Dragons: Story of J.R.R. Tolkien’, it wasn’t possible logistically…
A behind-the-scenes look into the art-making process for ‘What Rosa Brought’ The endpapers of a picture book are the first thing a reader sees when opening the book and the last thing before closing it. (They’re the pages of paper that are glued down to the cover board and connect to the book’s pages.) Depending on the printing process, the endpapers might be a solid piece of colored paper or they…