Hello lovely readers!

A few years ago my dear mother went full Carol Baskin and came home with a savannah cat:

It’s part serval (read small African leopard), is walked on a lead, lest it decimate the local mice population and gnaws through whole frozen chickens. My parents even briefly moved to French country side so it had ‘room to roam’.

So, I didn’t have to stretch my imagination much to write a children’s book where mum comes home with a leopard on a lead:

Here are the neighbours’ reactions:

And here’s a behind the scenes peek at the process of creating the spread above.

First I come up with a concept for the page. I normally begin with flipping through my children’s book collection or library books to see how my illustrator idols have solved similar problems. I came across this spread in ‘The Troll’ illustrated by David Roberts which, like my text, had three different ‘scenes’ to illustrate on one page:

With the three panel idea in mind, I drew a tiny thumbnail sketch and blew it up in photoshop and added the text. A lot of the ideas are already in place at this stage:

Next, I printed the thumbnail sketch full size, taped it to the light box and put another piece of copier paper on top. (I like using copier paper for as long as possible - its cheap, scans easily and it’s possible to see through a couple of layers of it on the lightbox.) I decided to zoom in on the church door. This would make a nice framing device for the characters and would allow me to paint the brick in a dark contrasting colour to separate the middle panel from its neighbours. I showed the rough to my critique group.

My critique group suggested it would be fun if the final panel became a game of ‘spot the leopard’ by moving the tail to a new location. One more rough to try it out:

Then it was time to strip the internet of every image of cricketers, meringue wedding dresses and flabbergasted faces. I also examined every google image of ‘silly wedding hair’. There’s some brides with great senses of humor out there! Here’s a selection of the images I had on the computer while sketching:

I also took some reference shots of myself for the the cricketers and the photographer. Try and avoid the moments husband is on a work zoom call for this:

For the final sketch, I penciled things in with a blue, red or green pencil then when I was happy, went over with black.

In photoshop, I change the image to a CMYK file, and got rid of all the Cyan, Magenta and Yellow till only the black sketch was left:

Used photoshop to test out the color palette:

And finally, put big piece of water colour paper over the final sketch, inked with a brush and filled with water colour washes. Ta da!

How is your process different? Have your parents bought any ferocious pets I can use for the sequel?

Love,

Chantelle’s Studio

My dear mother went full Carol Baskin...