Designing and Creating a Children’s Picture Book: Behind the Scenes

🔎 Behind the Scenes of Creating a Picture Book

The first phases of the work to design a picture book (which you can view here) and illustrate a story always start with reading and rereading the text to fully immerse myself in the setting, the characters, their personalities, and their emotions. I think it’s a bit like an actor immersing themselves in the atmosphere of a script for a film performance. And indeed, in the various illustration courses I have taken, all the instructors have always repeated that a lot of cinema is involved in creating a picture book: the framing/shots, the characterization, the rhythm, the emphasis on certain scenes, etc.

After reading the story multiple times, I proceed by dividing it into sequences, then pairing the right illustrations with the text and choosing the necessary number of pages.

Then comes one of my favorite phases: character development, or character design. At this point, one must highlight and internalize the characteristics of the characters indicated by the author in the text, but also personally expand and deepen the personality of each character. And this book has many characters! 🙂 All personified animals.

In this case, I also did extensive research and selected references (images of the various animals), and I must say that I even studied the specific characteristics of certain animals: how the paws, the tail, the fur, the length are structured… The height, to make them realistic when they are close together… etc.

And I chose the various shape characteristics also based on the qualities of the character I wanted to emphasize: Commissioner Dormouse is a bit bulkier and heavier set to emphasize his peaceful and calm nature, while Frog and Heron are sleeker and more agile.

Then I chose a color palette that best recalled the mood of autumn. And precisely for this reason, I also worked heavily on the scene lighting to convey a warm and welcoming atmosphere, both for the autumn season and because that was the feeling the delicate story had transmitted to me.

The creation of the storyboard—that is, the preparatory sketches for each scene/page—which allows for good collaboration with the author on the individual illustrations, always occupies a very long and important part of a book’s production phases. In this case, since we didn’t have a publisher involved and the book was custom-made for the client, the storyboard also helped us choose the final format of the book.

And after all this long study phase, the creation of the final artwork arrived, for which I used the digital technique with Adobe Photoshop, aiming nonetheless for a painterly, semi-traditional style.

Below, I’m leaving you a digital painting video where I recorded the main phases of creating the final illustration. I hope you like it, and I look forward to seeing you on my blog again soon!

If you want to read about the working phases of my new picture book: How is a picture book born?

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And if you have a great story you’d like me to illustrate, I would be very happy to discuss it with you! 🙂

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If you want to see other children’s books I’ve worked on: CHILDREN’S BOOKS – PORTFOLIO

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