Of the 30 picture books I have illustrated thus far, with 5 of these titles I am also the author. So I’m always writing my own picture book stories… Because as much as I love to illustrate the stories of other authors, being able to create the illustrative images for one of my own stories is even more thrilling due to automatically having complete understanding of and simpatico with the text! In other words the imagery and actions described within my own story are images I want to create without any reservations!
a preliminary test illustration (character study) for The Friend Ship, a new picture book story written by Steven Salerno, which depicts little Mike bringing the wooden toy boat (that his Grampy made for him) to the stream nearby…
When I write a new story, after finally arriving at the stage where I feel that I’m essentially done… before I even entertain presenting the story to an editor, because I am also an illustrator many times I will also create some preliminary test illustrations to begin to visually work out the look of the main characters and the general feel of how I might actually illustrate this particular story. Above is one of these test preliminary illustrations I created for one of my new stories entitled, The Friend Ship. It’s about a boy visiting his grandparents on their little farm for the summer and is complaining he doesn't have any friends to play with. So Grampy makes him a wooden toy boat and insists his grandson place the boat into the nearby brook and must follow the boat carried away in the current… The boy doesn't understand why he must follow the toy boat, but Grampy knows it will be the perfect way for his grandson to spontaneously gain some new friends. This illustration posted here, the trees and landscape were drawn with crayon , then the drawing was scanned into Adobe Photoshop. The drawing of the boy was drawn in Adobe Illustrator then transferred into Photoshop and layered in with the drawing of the tress and landscape. The color was all painted digitally in Photoshop…
(DETAIL VIEW) a preliminary test illustration (character study) for The Friend Ship, a new picture book story written by Steven Salerno, which depicts little Mike bringing the wooden toy boat (that his Grampy made for him) to the stream nearby…
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