Evolution of an illustration

The final image, showing Henry
Bergh jumping through the skylight.

For the past three months I've been working on a non-fiction children's book that will be released next Spring. I am very excited about this project, not only because of the fascinating subject matter (more on that in a second) but because it is my first assignment with a major publisher (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). The book is titled "Mercy, The Incredible True Story of Henry Bergh, Founder of the ASPCA," by Nancy Furstinger.

April of 2016 will mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of the ASPCA and being an animal lover, I'm very excited that the book I am illustrating will be released in conjunction with the ASPCA's anniversary celebrations.

For this posting I am going to let my readers in on the process of how I went about creating one of the illustrations for "Mercy." In the book's introduction, author Nancy Furstinger relates a suspenseful incident involving ASPCA founder Henry Bergh and his attempt to put a stop to a dog fight. The scene describes him waiting on the rooftop of a building where a fight was about to take place. He and another officer are watching the activities of the dog owners through a skylight. Just before the men release their dogs, Henry leaps through the skylight. I won't tell you how the scene ends, you'll have to read the book to find out, but in this post, I'll show you how I came up with the illustration that will accompany this scene in the book.

Reference books from the library

The action for this scene takes place in 1866. So, before beginning any sketching, I researched the time period. Henry Bergh was born in 1813 and died in 1888, his life spanning much of the nineteenth century. To begin my research, I checked out a number of books from the library, including books on fashions of the period and references for both human and animal anatomy. Much of my research though was done online. For this particular illustration I needed an image of a man jumping down through an open skylight. One of my favorite online sources for visual reference material is Getty images, which is actually a stock photography site for purchasing the rights to hi-res images for use in publications. But it's also a great source for reference images to aid in your drawings. The previews that come up when you do a search will be at screen resolution and have a watermark across them, but since they are to be used only for drawing reference, they are extremely useful for finding people in various poses, styles of dress, etc.

The leaping man in this image became my reference
for Henry Bergh jumping through the skylight

To start on this illustration I entered a number of search terms, things like 'man jumping,' 'man jumping down,' 'man leaping,' etc.  I not only used Getty images, but I did "Google" searches as well, using the same search terms. Once I started finding some possibly useful images, I downloaded them in to a folder on my computer. Using Adobe Bridge, I was then able to organize and look at thumbnails of all of my downloaded images. While using Getty images, I discovered some wonderful late nineteenth century illustrations from a periodical titled 'Le Petit Journal.' These illustrations were loaded with action and great period details and provided useful reference in several of my illustrations including this one.

An early attempt at a layout using
cut and pasted reference material

Once I had enough images, I did a rough layout by cutting and pasting some of my reference figures into a sort of collage. These collages were my early attempts at getting the illustration to match how, in my imagination, I felt the scene should look.  I played with several poses from various images and if things didn't look like how I imagined them, I would start over from scratch.  This scene on the left is my first attempt at a layout.

If I were an expert at drawing anatomy and perspective from scratch, I might have opted to just sketch out my idea. But since I had already downloaded the reference images, I found it was quicker to do a rough cut-and-paste job of my reference materials. That way I could move the elements around, scale them, flip them, etc. until I achieved a layout I was happy with.

Below are some examples of how my collage layout changed to reflect my evolving idea of how I wanted the scene to look.  Once I had the main figures positioned where I wanted them, I began to draw. I drew the dogs freehand, without much in the way of reference. I also made up whatever figures and elements were missing from my collage. The sketch shown at the bottom below displays the final layout, although I did make some changes to the dogs before I began to ink and color the illustration. I did all of my coloring and painting in Corel Painter 12, primarily using the digital watercolor brushes.

a second attempt where I've changed
some of the reference elements

The scene is starting to come together
 although the foreground is too
crowded, with no room to show the dogs.

Here I have begun to sketch out the scene based
on my cut and pasted collage. Some elements,
like the dogs, and some of the faces in the crowd,
I made up without much in the way
of any reference.

Mistress Masham's Repose

Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Maria is shown the tiny livestock
illustration by Fritz Eichenberg

The premise of Mistress Masham’s Repose is a clever one - the travels of Lemuel Gulliver described in Jonathan Swift’s “Gulliver’s Travels” actually took place and some Lilliputians, captured on a later expedition, have escaped and have been hiding out and living in exile on a rundown English estate.  For over a century, they have managed to avoid detection by living inside of a garden folly. Their secret comes close to being exposed when they are discovered by Maria, a young girl living on her ancestor’s estate. For me, the best parts of the book were in White’s descriptions of how the tiny Lilliputians are forced to cope in a land of gigantic threats. The writing is often somewhat dense, but filled with humor and White shines in describing the foibles of his characters. The character of Maria is not always likable but White uses her to show how a little power can corrupt even a person with the best of intentions. As is often the case, the villains of the story are often the most interesting characters and White has created a devious pair in the characters of Maria’s governess, Miss Brown and Mr. Hater, a greedy Vicar. There is a lot of suspense created when these two conniving schemers discover the existence of the Lilliputians and plot ways to make a fortune off of them. They even discuss murdering Maria if it should become necessary to achieve their gains. White fills the book with doses of English humor (which may go over the heads of some younger readers) and frequently goes off on rather esoteric tangents, which I felt slowed down the narrative. If it weren’t for these esoteric and wordy asides, I probably would have given this book 5 stars. All in all, it’s an enjoyable read, especially if you’re in the mood for a story rooted in a classic of English literature. If you can, make sure and find an edition that contains the fantastic illustrations by Fritz Eichenberg. His amazing pen and ink work perfectly captures the humor and drama in White's story.

All illustrations are by Fritz Eichenberg and were scanned from a 1946 copy of Mistress Masham's Repose by T.H. White, published by G.P. Putnam's Sons.

The book has recently been reprinted by The New York Review Children's Collection.


Click on the illustrations to see them larger.

Miss Brown and Mr. Hater poke a captured Lilliput

Miss Brown discovers the People in Maria's room

The Professor and the People try to figure out
a way to release Maria from the dungeon

Some of the dangers faced by a
person who is only six inches tall.

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My Favorite Picture Book of 2013

Mr. Tiger Goes Wild by Peter Brown
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I first became aware of author/illustrator Peter Brown with his lovely picture book from 2009, “The Curious Garden.” I’ve followed his output ever since and with his latest book, “Mr. Tiger Goes Wild,” he has become one of my favorite author/illustrators. Using minimal text in combination with his wonderfully mid-century style illustrations, Brown manages to tell a surprisingly complex tale of bucking the norm and being true to oneself. Mr. Tiger lives in a society of animals that dress in human clothes, walk upright and are rigidly formal in their polite behavior. But for Mr. Tiger, always being prim and proper is a boring way to live. One day, he has a wild idea - he decides to walk on all fours! Right away he feels better, but when he decides to shed his clothes and run wild, his friends lose their patience and ask him to take his wild behavior to the wilderness. Without spoiling the ending, I will say that I found the resolution of this fun tale to be a delightful surprise.

illustration by Peter Brown from "Mr. Tiger Goes Wild"

The double-page spread where Mr. Tiger decides to shed his clothes is ingenious in its design and simplicity. A large public fountain forms the center of the two-page design (see last image at bottom). On the left page we see Mr. Tiger diving into one side of the fountain fully clothed. On the right page, we see Mr. Tiger emerging from the other side of the fountain but this time, without his clothes. Then we notice his clothes floating on the water. Turning the page, we see Mr. Tiger, standing on all fours, without a stitch of clothing to hide his magnificent striped coat. There is no text, words are unnecessary. His stance and the smile on his face tell us everything we need to know - Mr. Tiger has at last discovered his own true nature.

In this beautifully designed and humorous book, Brown presents the reader with a thought-provoking array of concepts - the stagnation of conformity, the joy in being different, respect for the rights of others, and making compromises. I highly recommend this book, definitely my favorite picture book of 2013!

detail from Peter Brown's "Mr. Tiger Goes Wild."

Double-page spread from "Mr. Tiger Goes Wild."

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Open This Little Book by Jesse Klausmeier
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What Jesse Klausmeier’s “Open This Little Book,”  lacks in plot, it makes up for in cleverness and creativity. This is one of those books that is so clever in its concept that I found myself thinking, “I wish I had thought of that.” Klausmeier and artist Suzy Lee have come up with a book that makes the page turn an exciting event and have so smartly integrated it into the book’s concept that this is one book (like a pop-up book) I can’t imagine ever working on a Kindle. Part of the genius of this book is the change in page/paper size as the book unfolds. The title page itself is smaller than the page that comes before it and each page after that gets physically smaller until you get to the middle of the book where the pages start getting larger again. Now this may not seem like a stroke of genius to you, but the author and artist have brilliantly combined this size-changing concept with a simple series of events that will teach kids about size relationships, colors, animals, patterns and the joys of reading. One thing that I didn’t even notice on my first read was that the color palette changes as the story goes along. Each turn of the page adds another new color until the reader gets to the final illustration where the reader is rewarded with a beautiful illustration that uses the entire rainbow spectrum of color that we’ve been slowly introduced to. Suzy Lee’s illustrations, which in a few places remind me of William Steig, are charming and the last illustration in the book is so delightful, it gets my vote for best children’s book illustration of the year! This is a really clever and fun book.

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House Held Up By Trees

House Held Up by Trees by Ted Kooser
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Ted Kooser’s beautiful history of a house is in someways reminiscent of Virginia Lee Burton’s “The Little House,” but unlike that book, Kooser doesn’t anthropomorphize his house or try to imbue it with human feelings.

In telling his story of a house from the time when it was new to its rebirth as a house held up by trees, Kooser, a former U.S. Poet Laureate uses language that is evocative but at the same time wistful. Like in Burton’s “The Little House,” the house in this story is the main character, the humans are secondary and they come and go. In the beginning we see the house when it is new, being cared for and loved by a man and his two children. Set in a clearing between two wooded lots, the house’s owner keeps the grounds immaculate, uprooting any seedlings that pop up in his perfect lawn. But as the years pass, the children move away and eventually so does their father. Sitting unsold, the house falls into disrepair. As time passes, seedlings and saplings pop up around it, hugging the house and protecting it from the winds. One day the trees, whose roots and branches have held the house together, begin to lift the house up toward the sky, where it is reborn as a house held up by trees. Jon Klassen’s digital and gouache illustrations are the perfect compliment for this somewhat melancholic story. Many of the illustrations are double-page spreads that give us wide panoramic vistas that emphasize the house’s isolation in the landscape. In two spreads early in the story we see the house as it looks from the point of view of the woods. We glimpse it through tree branches and see it sitting in the distance. It’s a clever foreshadowing of later illustrations where we will once again see the house through tree branches, the difference being that in the later illustrations we are up close to the house, with it looming large in the frame and the trees we are looking through are the ones that “held it together as if it was a bird’s nest in the fingers of their branches.”

As I mentioned, there are human characters in the story, but we never learn their names. We get glimpses of them from a distance or from behind, but we never see their faces. There are several haunting illustrations in this story that tugged at my heartstrings. In one, the two now grown children are shown from behind looking at the woods next to the house, a place where they use to run and play. It’s also a place where they would sit in the shadows and watch their father as he worked on his lawn. On the left side of the illustration are the woods, cool and inviting and unchanged from their childhood. On the right side, we see the adult children, the man holds a baseball cap at his side, while the woman holds a leaf. For me, these two details - a baseball cap and a leaf convey the melancholy of growing older. The only thing we can hold on to from our childhood are our memories and a few small mementoes, we must let go of everything else.

In another panoramic illustration, we see the father sitting in a folding chair, watching the sunset. The text tells us he is older now and his grown children "were gone for good . . ."  Next to the father, is an empty chair. On the left side of the spread we see through a window into the house's dining room where we get a glimpse of a lone place setting. Leaning against the outside of the house is the man’s lawnmower. Tall grass is starting to grow around it and even without the information in the text, we know that the man has given up on trying to keep up his lawn. It’s an illustration suffused with loneliness.

I loved this book. It was published by Candlewick, a publisher that seems to strive to put out beautiful books. This one is no exception. The language, illustrations and story are all beautiful. Having said that, I was somewhat surprised to see a publisher put out a children’s book that has no strong characters for children to identify with. It seems very much a book that will appeal more to adults looking back wistfully on their lost childhoods, then it will to most children. Maybe that's why I liked it so much. But I do hope that children will read this and love it. Those who do will be rewarded by a book that demonstrates the passage of time and what it means to grow older. Though there is a tone of loneliness in the book, there is also a comforting message of rebirth. I checked this book out from our public library, but it’s one that I fell in love with so I know I’ll be buying a copy for myself.

The illustrations below are by Jon Klassen from Ted Kooser's "House Held Up By Trees."

One of the panoramic two page spreads showing the house near the forest

Detail showing the house as it looks from the woods

A detail showing the father sitting alone on his perfect lawn

The now derelict house, sits alone, but the saplings are starting to surround it.

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A Bus Called Heaven

A Bus Called Heaven by Bob Graham
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Stella lives in the city. When an abandoned bus with a sign taped to it reading “Heaven” appears one morning in front of Stella’s house, people in the neighborhood seem to change. For once, they stop and talk to one another. Stella, who usually has her thumb in her mouth, changes as well. She sees potential in the old bus and before you know it, she has inspired her community to clean it up and turn it into a neighborhood club house where all are welcome. Everyone brings something to donate to their new community center - one little girl brings her goldfish, a little boy donates his comic books, Stella contributes her table soccer game, other people bring chairs, rugs and baked goods. One little girl loans her dog for people who just need to sit and pat something. This is a really sweet and delightful story of how a diverse neighborhood of people are able to work together for the betterment of their community. Author/Illustrator Bob Graham shows people of all ages, colors and creeds uniting to create a shared space where children can play (and fight), babies can crawl, people can laugh, granddads can scratch dogs, couples can meet, and families can show their vacation pictures. But this bit of heaven does face a crisis. When a junkyard man shows up with an order to remove the illegal vehicle, the community must figure out how to save it. I don't think it's a spoiler to say that Stella saves the day (and the bus!). The illustrations in this book are delightful - double paged spreads and pages with multiple illustrations are crammed with details. Cars and trucks, people of all shapes and sizes, dogs, birds, cityscapes, ships, and factories, houses and junkyards fill the pages and demand repeated viewings. A wonderful book about inclusion and working together to create a community.

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The Snow Book

While on a recent overnight getaway to Cincinnati, my partner Mark and I visited a used bookstore called, simply enough, the Ohio Bookstore. The website for this bookstore states that, distributed over its five floors, it has over 300,000 books and magazines in stock. I only had time to browse two of its five floors, but I believe their claim. I ended up spending a hundred dollars on used children's books and left with two shopping bags of books. Over the next several months, I'll share some of my finds on this blog.

Because it was recently requested that I feature it, I'm going to start with a non-fiction work called "The Snow Book," by Eva Knox Evans, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1965, with illustrations by Aldren A. Watson. Other than the fact that the author won the Jane Addams Children's book award in 1953 for another of her titles, "People Are Important," I was unable to find any other biographical information on her, though judging by the number of her books that are available through Amazon, she seemed to be a quite prolific non-fiction author. Though "The Snow Book," is out of print, there are used copies readily available through Amazon. If you are interested in a copy for yourself, you can click on the link in the book's title.

What convinced me to buy this book though, were the beautiful illustrations by Aldren A. Watson (Watson, who is also a woodworker has also written several books, including "The Blacksmith," and "Country Furniture"). When I first glanced through this book, it flipped open to one of several two-page spreads. I think this one of a man shoveling snow on a rural road, is the first one that caught my eye (click on any of these illustrations to see them larger). All of the book's illustrations are done in this style - black graphite or (or is it conte crayon?) lines, with the shadows colored in a beautiful aqua blue.  The snow is indicated by allowing the white of the paper to show through. The composition of this image with its curved road in the foreground, invites the viewer to enter the scene. Our eye begins with the man in the road, shoveling snow by a group of mailboxes.  The man appears to have stopped shoveling for a second and seems to be watching the truck that has just passed by.  We follow his gaze down the road to the truck that is plowing the road. We then notice a figure opposite the truck, who appears to be waving to the driver. From there we wander further into the scene and see another figure walking across the snow covered landscape. From there our eye wanders up to the snow covered hills. As our eye moves up and to the right, we come back to the foreground by moving down the tree that anchors the right edge of the scene. It's a beautiful illustration, one that keeps your eye moving and leaves you with the desire to study it and revisit it.

I'd say that the book is probably written for a 4th or 5th grade level, but it's a wonderful little book for anyone who wants to know more about this natural phenomenon. It explains what snow is, what makes it fall, how it is plowed, how people travel across it, how it is predicted, how it can be induced artificially (Chapter 8 "The Snow Gun") and what happens when it begins to melt away. Above each chapter heading, is an illustration. One of my favorites is the illustration for Chapter 4 "Snowshoes and Dogsleds." In this image, the illustrator has cleverly given us a cut-away side view that lets us see what is hidden by the high drifts of snow. On top of the snow, a man trudges along in his snowshoes. The fence he is walking towards is half-hidden by the height of the snow, and the artist allows the viewer to see just how deep the snow is, through his clever cross-section.

Here is another chapter heading illustration that I think is quite beautiful, this one from Chapter 2 "What is Snow?"

There are also images sprinkled throughout the margins of the book. In the section devoted to Wilson Bentley, the famous snowflake photographer, we see images of Bentley and his microscope, his camera and the different types of snowflakes.

 One of my favorites of these margin illustrations is this one that depicts the shadow of an airplane as it passes over a tiny figure standing beside a house that is half buried in the snow. I love the unusual perspective of this illustration. It's almost like the artist has invited us to sit alongside the pilot of the plane.

Earlier, I mentioned that the book contained several illustrations that spanned two pages. Here are several of the others. In case you are wondering where the page gutter is in these scans, I have attempted to remove the dividing gutter in all of these two-page illustrations, through some Photoshop manipulation. 

Illustration Friday - Dessert

I had a hard time deciding what to do for this week's 'Illustration Friday' word which is "Dessert." At the time I received the email containing this week's word, I was thinking about doing some drawings of funny monsters, so at first I thought I would do a monster having dessert, but I just couldn't picture in my mind how it would look. Then I began to think about doing something different - I began to think about a little boy sitting at a large table, peaking over the edge of the table, mesmerized by a large cake. As I began to draw this idea, I started getting frustrated when I couldn't get my drawing to match the picture I imagined in my head. But as I was drawing, I came up with another idea. I began to think about the times when I was a kid (and even still as an adult) when my favorite part of going out to eat was checking out all of the desserts in the display cases. I decided to keep the little boy, but this time I would have him staring at a whole bunch of desserts in a restaurant or bakery display case. This would give me the chance to draw lots of yummy desserts, which I felt would make for a more interesting and colorful image.

Above is my first sketch of the little boy at the table and to the right is the second sketch I came up with, which is what I based the finished piece on.

I created this image entirely in Corel Painter 11. I used a light beige colored canvas to give the image a sort of warm, vintage feel. I painted the image using Painter's watercolor brushes, and added some texture and detail using the gouache, chalk and leaky pen brushes.

Illustration Friday - Caged

Depicting a caged animal in a zoo is a fairly obvious way to interpret this week's 'Illustration Friday,' word, which is "caged," but it is the first thing that came into my mind. I love animals and even though my feelings about zoos are a bit ambivalent, I love going to them for the opportunity it gives me to see animals from around the world. It breaks my heart to see a caged animal, but on the other hand I know that zoos now play an important part in conservation and preserving species that might otherwise go extinct in the wild. For the most part, zoos have come a long way in creating more stimulating and naturalistic enclosures for their animals. I doubt that zoos even use the word cage today to describe where their animals live. Still, even at the best zoos you will see enclosures that seem to small for the animals that they house.  This seems especially true for the big cats like leopards, tigers, cheetahs, ocelots, panthers and lions. Who hasn't gone to a zoo and seen one of these majestic animals pacing back and forth in front of their bars, or just sitting staring into space?

I have been to a great number of zoos here in the USA - the Los Angeles Zoo, the San Diego Zoo, Seattle's Woodland Park Zoo, Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo, the Cincinnati Zoo, the Indianapolis Zoo and Chicago's Lincoln Park zoo. It was last year while visiting the Lincoln Park zoo where I was saddened to see some of the big cats on display in very old, very cramped enclosures. All of the cats who were awake at the time, sure enough, were pacing back and forth. So, when I thought about the word "Caged," a big cat in a small, concrete cage is what came to my mind.

I created a number of sketches before I finally came up with something I was happy with.  My earliest sketch is this one from my sketchbook where I was trying to develop a sad lion character.

From there I began to develop my scene, putting the lion in a setting, and adding some human characters.

I had a certain vision in my head of what I wanted the people to look like, but I had a difficult time achieving what was in my mind's eye. The character that gave me the most trouble was that of the overweight woman. As you can see in the first sketch, I had her as a mother, being dragged by her little boy to see the lion.

Then I decided to give her a different look - I switched her to this character, a large woman in cat-eye glasses, wearing plaid pants and holding a bag of popcorn. Instead of holding his mother's hand, I gave the little boy a balloon. By this time, I had also added in the two other children.

Although I think that drawing would have worked, I preferred the idea of the little boy dragging his mother over to see the lion, so ultimately I reverted back to my earlier version. I made a few changes though. I slimmed her down a tiny bit, changed the pose of her feet to make her look more like she was in motion and I gave her a purse to hold. I also took the balloon away from the little boy and gave it to the little girl on the left side. I tried to make the ballon a sort of counterbalance to the sun on the right.

Here, with my final sketch on a separate layer, I have begun to block in the colors. The entire image was created in Corel Painter 11. I used Painter's digital watercolor brushes for the walls of the cage and the brick wall foundation. For the lion and the human characters I primarily used Painter's gouache brushes.

As I mentioned earlier, I had a certain vision in my mind's eye of how I wanted this image to look.  My original vision was much more stylized, but I just couldn't get the stylization to look the way that I imagined it. The finished result is closer to the look of a Little Golden Book illustration, which seems to be a style that I'm working in more and more.

Anyway, thanks for reading all of this.  Comments are always welcome!