Tag: process

For the Scripture Princesses Blog Tour, I created shareable graphics for the bloggers to post with their reviews. Here is all of them, all together.

I hope you’ll find them inspirational.

These are the portraits of the women from the chapter beginnings in Scripture Princesses. The book itself is black and white with ink drawings, but I wanted these to be in color. I created these by first adjusting the line color of each portrait in photoshop and printing them onto cardstock with our inkjet printer that has waterproof ink. Cardstock isn’t the best paper to be painting on, but it’ll go through a desktop printer, so it’s a compromise.

I watercolored each portrait, focusing on being fast and loose, and using a mostly two color scheme for each.

This one of Mary Magdalene isn’t from the chapter head, but instead from the illustration where she sees the risen Christ and realizes who he is. My chapter-head portrait of her is sad, so I chose to paint her graphic from this happy scene.

Because cardstock isn’t meant for watercoloring, after I let each one dry, I put it under a pile of heavy books for the night to flatten down all the curling. It worked decently.

Here’s them all laid out in their pretty painted glory:

I wish I had thought of flattening under books as I was creating my 114 page graphic novel Together, which is also watercolored on cardstock. I used cardstock then because it was cheap and easy. 🙂 I was unemployed or under-employed through a lot of the creation of that comic in 2008-2010.

Together can read in it’s entirety here.

I hope many people will enjoy these! They can be pinned, shared, and if you click on them, they are sized for a decent print-out for a small poster.

On Saturday, I marathon thumb-nailed my entire book!

It took around eight hours, with me moving between pleasantly empty restaurants, the park where I got too much sun, and the library every few hours. At the library I caught the end of a lovely soprano recital, and read Shannon Hale and company’s The Princess in Black, which is completely adorable.

The final Scripture Princesses book will have around 100 illustrations.

Generally, thumbnails are the most thought and labor intensive part of my process. But since I’d finished all the writing, and had mocked up the lay out of my book, my thumbnails were mostly choosing which scenes needed pictures the most, and roughing out quickly what happens in each scene.

My initial thumbnails are barely legible, rather like my handwriting. But I know what I mean by them. Right now, most are flat people-talking-to-people, so next I’ll work on composition to try to get depth and interest in each illustration.

Who do you think this rough sketch is of? Impossible to tell, eh?

It will be Adam and Eve and their family after the Garden.