Hi there!
I’m going to take you behind the scenes of how I made the illustrations for the book “Mon Premier Livre Veilleuse” (“My First Nightlight Book”) with French publisher Éditions Auzou.
STEP 1: getting the project and brief
If you’re an illustrator or want to become one, you might wonder: how did I get the job in the first place?
The answer is I contacted the publisher directly via email, with some samples of my work and a link to my website. I had found out about this publisher by following illustrators I admire on Instagram. For example, Tiago Americo had several projects with them, Maria Neradova worked with them too. So I gathered my courage and sent the email, hoping my style would also be a good fit.
Luckily enough, they liked what they saw and wrote back with the book project. I collaborated with the editor and art director, and everything went very smoothly—the communication and feedback was clear, prompt and polite. I would definitely work with them again.
STEP 2: rough sketches
Ok, now on to the illustrating part. The story is a bedtime story, meant to help little children fall asleep. As the name suggests, it features a lamp in the center of the right-side pages, that when pressed, lights up and starts singing a sweet lullaby (adorable!). This also meant there was a die line cut (a hole) on each left side page. So I had to arrange my composition away from the center of each page. Deciding where to put the characters and trying to achieve balance throughout the spreads was the challenging aspect of this book.
As usual in my process, I started out with pencil sketches and put my first ideas on page.
After that, I moved to Adobe Illustrator, where I sketched some more. Once I felt I found some good first compositions, I sent in a PDF with a few very rough sketches. The idea was to get feedback quickly and make sure I’m on the right path. Spending too much time making these initial sketches “beautiful” can turn out to be a waste of time. They just need to be readable for the art director to see where you plan to put the elements on the page.
I also sent in two versions for the design of Orion, a bear and a bunny. They chose the bear character.
STEP 3: detailed sketches
After the first round of feedback, I refined the sketches more, following the requested changes: the book was meant to be light, airy, not too busy with lots of characters and elements. Here’s what the final sketches looked like:
Orion’s character position was set on the right side of each page (except the last), but I made small changes to how he was sitting on his cloud, to add a little variety to the spreads (page openings).
STEP 4: color
Once the compositions were approved, it was time to move on to color. The art director mentioned they wanted a soft atmosphere, with colors that aren’t too bright and vivid, to soothe children and make them sleepy. With that in mind, I put all the spreads in one document, so I can have an overview of the book, and started planning out my colors.
This was a good starting point, but I noticed that some spreads were a little too similar in terms of color. So I decided to give each one a slightly different color palette, while still trying to achieve harmony throughout the book.
I worked in Adobe Illustrator and added the magic dust using Photoshop. With some input from the art director, I played around some more with the colors and here is the final result:
That’s it! I hope you enjoyed reading about my illustrating process! If you’d like to, you can buy the book here (it’s in French).
Until next time,
Teodora