Starting a new book

I haven't been on my blog in a while and the next few weeks are going to be busy for me : a family wedding, moving my daughter out of her college dorm and back home for the summer, traveling to southern Illinois for my son's graduation from SIU... In the meantime, though, I'm happy to start work on another book for Kane Press. Since I feel that this blog should be a record of what I'm working on and how I work, I'm posting my first sketches, even though they look like a bunch of chicken scratchings! I always start with sketches of the main characters so I can get an idea of how they'll look...

I also do thumbnail sketches of the entire book, in this case using the manuscript and layouts provided by the publisher. This gives me an idea of how the illustrations will flow, so I have variety in the compostions. I also decide what parts of the story I want to emphasize with the illustrations.

And then there's all the reference research for specific objects, which I mostly do on the computer now. It's much easier - I just google in something like "photos of girl sitting cross-legged" and I get tons of photos! I can throw out my boxloads of xeroxed references! Anyway, you can see how much work goes into the book even before I start drawing something serious.