If you have read some other articles on my website, you know that I am curious about all parts of the book creation process. I love hearing from illustrators about their process to create illustrations for a book. I reached out to Kyla Wiebe to ask her about her process working with Samuel Schaeffer on his Journey with Joseph through Advent book, which will soon be featured as one of my case studies. She provided so much interesting material about the illustration creation process that I decided to make it a blog post of its own.
At what point in their writing does an author need to find an illustrator, or does a publisher start looking for an illustrator?
I am usually contacted by the publisher once the book is fully written and edited. For Journey with Joseph through Advent, I was contacted by the publisher, who wanted to connect me with Samuel for this project.
It is essential that the manuscript be completely finalized before I begin illustrating. Some time ago I illustrated a book for an independent author who sent the book to be edited after I had illustrated it. The editor suggested adding several pages, which meant that the author needed to reconnect with me and get more illustrations. However, I had already moved on to other projects, so she needed to wait for a while before I was able to get to her book again, and of course there were added fees. So, please make sure your manuscript is completely finalized before contacting the illustrator.
Do you help to decide the page size of the book you will illustrate?
Sometimes I give a suggestion, but that’s usually up to the author and publisher. Usually that decision has been made before I am involved.
What is the process of an author or publisher engaging with an illsutrator? How long does it take to complete the illustrations?
The process of working with an illustrator is a pretty long one, so it’s important to establish a good working relationship, with a lot of good communication. Usually it goes something like this:
1. Contract negotiation: This is where we agree about style, price, number of pages / pieces of art, etc. I usually make up a project plan price calculator to show them, and then once we agree on that, they send me the initial 50% deposit for the project. I price the artwork by the final art size (per square inch).
2. Pagination and illustration thumbnails: Once the first payment is sent, I start on pagination and illustration thumbnails. Pagination is when I create a very rough version of the book, with illustration placeholders in it. I send a pdf to the author to see if they like it. Thumbnails are super rough sketches of the illustrations, to agree on content and composition. During this stage on Samuels’s book, I was trying to push an idea that all the illustrations would be from Joseph’s point of view. But as I sent the thumbnails, Samuel decided that he didn’t want that, so the point of view (POV) changed. That’s why I create thumbnails, so I can find that sort of thing out! Below is an example of an illustration of Mary telling Jospeh the story of Zechariah. In the end we did something very different.
3. Pencils: After all the thumbnails are done and approved by the author (or art director), I move on to what we call “pencils” (pencil drawings), which are also submitted for approval. Below you see the pencilled version of Zechariah, and then the inked version.
4. Inking and coloring: After all the pencils are done, I move on to inking, then colouring. By this point usually there are no more changes to the images because it’s difficult to edit inked and painted illustrations. I ask for a lot of feedback during the thumbnail and pencilling stage, to avoid having to make changes during the inking or colouring stage. Below you see the Zechariah illustration in its final colored stage.
During this whole process I send updates to the art director and/or author using a project planning app called Asana. For this particular book, we made each illustration a “task” with multiple subtasks:
Thumbnails (assinged to me)
Check thumbnails (assigned to publisher and author)
Pencils (me)
Check pencils (assigned to publisher and author)
Ink (me)
Colour (me)
Upload final art (me)
Other miscellaneous tasks payments, signing contracts, etc. This helps my illustration projects to run smoothly. Some illustrators collaborate using Trello (similar to Asana) or Google Drive (making documents and sheets that everyone keeps track of).
5. Delivering the final artwork: After all the illustrations are done and agreed upon, I usually make up a Dropbox folder with high quality scans of all the artwork in there, receive the final payment, and then it’s out of my hands, and the art director or book designer uses the art to create the book layout files for print. I was particularly pleased with the design and print quality of Journey with Joseph Through Advent. It really looked so nice when it was all put together!
What if I want to make coloring book images? What is the process for that?
Yes, after Journey with Joseph through Advent was published, the author engaged me a second time to create a coloring book using the same 25 story images. This was a separate project since I needed to create new artwork, so we made up a new contract and he paid another downpayment. Since the artwork was not really new, it took a lot less time and less back-and-forth at the front end of the project. I traced the outlines of the original paintings into more colorable pages. The original inked artwork wasn’t really suitable for coloring, and the page size was wrong. We needed it to suit letter (8.5x11”) and A4 paper sizes for a regular-sized coloring book. Below is the Zechariah image. Notice how it is similar but different than the inked illustrations we used for the picture book.
How long does the illustration process take for a book?
The process for creating all the illustrations for a book can take between four and six months. It really depends on how many illustrations there are. It can be hard to predict exactly how long each stage will take. At the time when I was creating the paintings for Journey with Joseph through Advent, I was also working at a camp, so you can see below how I worked in my camper!
Many thanks to Kyla for sharing in so much detail the process she goes through to create book illustrations. I can’t get enough of her reels and behind-the-scenes posts on her Instagram. Or check out her porftolio here. If you are working on a book and have questions about any part of the process, get in touch with me.