One of my Dungeons and Dragons pals is involved in book publishing at Rivershore Books. I had created character art of our adventuring party, and after seeing my work she asked if I would be interested in referrals from authors seeking illustrators.
Having a full time job and a family doesn’t leave me with a lot of bandwidth to take on large freelance projects, but I said yes, figuring if a project wasn’t a good fit I could always decline. The very first client she introduced me to ended up being about the easiest client I have ever had the pleasure to work with — she was looking for an illustrator for her children’s book about a basset hound that uses his sense of smell to solve a mystery. After some back and forth, I took the gig.
To determine the general style and artistic medium for the book, I asked the client for examples of existing children’s books that had a similar style to what she envisioned, and did two test images (based on my son and my dog) to make sure we were on the same page. Ultimately I ended up using a combination of digital and traditional media, but maintained the watercolor and ink outline look that the client wanted.
After that it was time for visual development. This primarily consisted of figuring out how basset hounds work, how to handle making twins look like twins but also distinct, supporting character designs, and location paintings based on reference from the client — the setting was based on her hometown. There was a lot of back and forth with the client during this part of the process.
Once the designs were agreed upon, I storyboarded the book (the stick-figure version) to figure out which images would be needed, what was going to be a full page illustration vs a spot illustration, and so on. After that, I created the rough illustrations and a color script to finalize the compositions and color palette.
Up to this point, the work had all been done digitally on my iPad. Now it was time to get the watercolors out and start painting the final images! I ended up printing the approved digital roughs and lightly tracing them onto watercolor paper, then working through the final paintings mostly by color — for example, I mixed the blue for the sky and painted all the pages with sky, then mixed the brown for the basset hound and painted all the pages with the basset hound, etc.
When it came time for inking, I scanned the watercolor paintings and did the ink and clean up digitally. Below is the final result from some of the pages — if you want to see all of them you’ll have to buy the book!
Throughout the two year process the client was easy to communicate with, flexible on the timeline, and understanding when life happened and progress slowed down. I felt super blessed to have such a great client — 10/10, would work for again!
Some future goals I have coming out of this project are being able to more accurately estimate how long a project like this will take me to complete, and to fully digitize my workflow. I’ve been experimenting with some digital watercolor brushes by Max Ulichney and am excited to use them on future projects!
To hear more about the author’s side of the process from Tracy Hyde, check out this podcast episode.
Detective Murray is available for purchase on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.