Behind the Scenes of Charlie’s Dirt Day – PART 4 – sketch

For this sketch, I tried to make the composition more interesting by playing with the foreground. I liked the idea of bringing the viewer into the scene on the left side of the spread with a close up of a bowl of freshly picked tomatoes while Charlie and Mr. Martino made a sauce in the background on the right side. Whenever possible, I like to inte ...

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Here's another peek at some of the final art from my next book.The Character of Charlie was based on a sketch I had done when I was traveling through Europe. At one point, my husband and I were living in Paris and I was drawing more than I ever have in all my life. I did a lot of sketches of children at that time and there was one in particular tha ...

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When designing an illustration for a picture book, you need to leave room for the text. This double page spread had quite a bit of text to work around. In my initial thumbnail, I had envisioned the older man on the right side filling most of the page, however, I ended up needing to adjust him quite a bit to make even more room for text in the space ...

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This illustration is probably my favourite one from Charlie's Dirt Day because I included lots of personal touches. Several of the characters in this spread made appearances in my first picture book, Bye, Bye Butterflies, such as the lady in the yellow cardigan on the left, the little boy pulling the wagon and the little girl in the right corner wi ...

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This image is one that I had in my mind from the very beginning, and you can see from the initial thumb nail sketch below that it didn't change much. Because of all of the characters that I wanted to include, this spread was quite intimidating for me. I ended up spending a lot of time on it in order to fit in everything in a way that worked.When de ...

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