Author & Illustrator
Emmaline and the Bunny

Here’s page 21 of “Gwendolyn Grace” from first sketches to finished art…

These are sketches from when Gwendolyn Grace was being born in my brain. In the very middle, you can see a very rough drawing of an alligator swimming in a bathtub. This is the beginning stage of what became page 21 in “Gwendolyn Grace”—her scuba diving in the tub (with her bird and dog nearby).

That sketch evolved into this drawing. I did it in black, white, and grays because I didn’t want to deal with color until later. It’s still pretty rough, but good enough to use in a dummy (a ‘fake’ book I put together of the images and text so I can see how it reads).

Here’s a BETTER drawing, still in black and white. At this point, I’m pretty happy with how the characters look and the composition of the page.

Next, I removed the grays and the text from the image, so I could print it on watercolor paper and paint it.

Here it is painted with watercolor, and I added colored pencil. I painted outside of the lines, because I knew I was going to scan the image back into my computer, erase any excess paint, and then paint the rest of the image digitally. You’ll see…

And here’s the final page, with the remainder of the image painted in Photoshop.

Hooray!