As an illustrator, I am always curious to see the process other illustrators go through to create their work. For those of you interested in my process, here are some screen shots from a recent job.

This was a project for Evan-Moor Corp. It was for their series of "Top Student" Grade 1 books. There had to be 9 things in the scene that did not belong. I had a lot of fun with this one :)

Screen 1:

I usually sketch a couple of rough thumbnails to layout the scene and characters.

When I have a better idea of how everything will work in the scene, I scan it into photoshop to tighten it up. You can see the changes that were made after reworking it a bit.

Screen 2:

After the sketch is approved, I open Illustrator and create a layer for my sketch. I use the transform window and set the opacity to about 18 percent so that the sketch is very light. I then create a new layer for my black lines and redo the sketch with the pencil tool.

Screen 3:

After tracing my sketch, I click off this layer and create a new layer called “background”. With the sketch layer turned back on, I lay out the flat color for the background. I keep it pretty simple.

Scene 4:

I then work on the flat layer of color for the foreground images. I toggle the background layer on and off so I can see how the colors are working with the background. For me, figuring out the color scheme is the part that takes the longest.

Scene 5:

Then I create a new layer for details.

Scene 6:

And a separate layer for shadows.

Scene 7:

Finally, I go over the scene adding in more detail like ground shadows and grass. Here's where I tweak the image a bit and since the foreground is separate from the background I can enlarge things or move things around if I need to.

That's pretty much it. It's a very condensed version of my process, but I think you get the idea. Hope you enjoyed it and thanks for visiting :)

Can you spot the 9 things that do not belong?

Zook • written by Kris Bonnell • Published by RR Books

The following character studys are from a series of books I worked on for RR Books. Written by Kris Bonnell, the series is about a mischievous little monster named Zook. Zook is a fun loving guy drawn to anything dirty, sticky and yucky which is part of the reason these books were so much fun to work on. To see how the finals turned out please click on the "Color" link above.