Working on this book has been an amazing and challenging journey, and I’m excited to show everything we’ve done! I thought I’d share my illustration work process with you and how I got from concept to the final product.
Berrett-Koehler Publishers was looking to create a colorful illustration for Blaze Your Own Trail, a choose your own adventure book by Rebekah Bastian. The target audience was young women in their 20’s and 30’s who are navigating many of life’s difficult choices, and their team wanted to create something that showed women being empowered while exploring many different life paths.
Concept
I wanted to represent the concept of the book (empowering women and facing a multitude of choices in life) in a way that added depth to the main idea and wasn’t overly literal about the metaphor of paths and choices.
I pitched six sketched concepts to the client, with the goal of showing six different ways to represent exploring life’s many paths. I drew from my own feelings and experiences being a twenty-something trying to navigate adulthood–and the feelings of being lost and lonely, but still quietly optimistic and hopeful for what’s ahead.
I drew these on a super old Wacom tablet connected to Photoshop…not my ideal drawing tool anymore!
Step 1: Make a nice messy, crappy pencil sketch and take a photo of it. I bump up the contrast so I can see it more easily when I trace it in Illustrator.
Illustration Process
The client was most interested in exploring the concept of having the scenes and paths coming out of her steps, but splitting them into different paths.
Like always, I started with a sketch to just dump my idea out on paper–in this case it’s a few unglamorous, scribbly pencil sketches (plus a few potato chip stains).
Afterwards, I made the first rendering draft in Adobe Illustrator. While Illustrator can feel clunky since you can’t really “draw” well in the program, it allowed me to edit and experiment more quickly than I could have in more drawing based apps (I also didn’t own an iPad at the time!).
Edit & Revise (and then edit & revise some more)
Here’s the part that often is the hardest to get through, but is often what really pushes and improves my work the most (in ways that I’m happy about in retrospect). It can be tedious and frustrating, since you feel like you’re so close but so far away from finishing the piece! I was lucky to work with a wonderful art director who encouraged and guided me the whole way.
Confession: I struggled with the pose of character quite a bit. Hands and feet are STILL a challenge for me, especially when it’s in vector and the shapes have to be really precise. You can see from the first to last image how much she changes (from being super flat & rough to much more realistic), and I think the design is better for it, even though that wasn’t my instinctive style.
And… the final design! The entire illustration process spanned over two months (it took even longer with interior illustrations, which I’ll share more about later!).
Check out that sweet spot gloss on the cover (all you paper/printing nerds will feel me on this)! The book will be released on February 12th, 2020–with a launch party at The Riveter in Seattle!