I did a fun blog post interview with Raymond K. Nakamura for Science Borealis about illustrating the book Emmy Noether: The Most Important Mathematician You’ve Never Heard Of, written by Helaine Becker. You can find the post here:
https://blog.scienceborealis.ca/communicating-science-through-picture-books-illustrator-kari-rust/
Book 1 of The Weird Sisters series of chapter books written by Mark David Smith (Owlkids Books) is out this month (April 2022)! It is a super fun chapter book and a cute little package (designed so beautifully by Elisa Gutiérrez).
I was honoured to be asked to contribute a list of recommendations to a book website called Shepherd. I chose the topic: “The best books featuring animal friends and creative, artful illustrations”. You can see the recommendations by going to the link below or the screen capture image above, then explore from there! The website was created to be a digital version of a good bookstore browsing experience. Check it out!
https://shepherd.com/best-books/animal-friends-and-creative-illustrations
If you look very carefully at the pictures in The House at the End of the Road, you can see that things in the garden at Mr. P’s house change over time. We all know that things change: kids grow, the seasons go from one to the next and with the seasons nature shows signs of change. Can you think of other things that change in this story? (Places? People? Feelings?)
In this case, the original rough (“thumbnail”) drawings and the book’s final illustrated spread ended up being very close. It doesn’t often happen like this! Because I wrote and illustrated The House at the End of the Road, the picture creation and writing went hand-in-hand and I kind of developed both of them at the same time.
Here is a page from my sketchbook with drawings of some of the many creepy crawlies I included in The House at the End of the Road. (Try and spot them in the final illustrations!)
The illustrations for The House at the End of the Road were made up of many layers, especially those images showing the garden with all the plants and trees. Here are some drawings that are layered into Mr. Peterson’s garden. For inside spaces, I liked to include custom-made wallpaper like this wheat pattern (see below).
Here are some early sketches I made while developing the book. It was important to get the characters right as well as the house and property of Mr. P - the house and land around it were like “characters” in the story.
In The House at the End of the Road I included some bugs and creepy-crawly creatures in the illustrations. They occur in about 14 places in the book. Some are easy to spot, while others are well hidden. Can you find them all? (Here are two.)
I have some prints and drawings showing in the lobby of the Waterfront Theatre during the run of Carousel Theatre for Young People’s The Incredible Adventures of Mary Jane Mosquito, and Peter Pan. Included are these original drawings.
I found that it was included in a CBC book list, which is particularly exciting for me (a regular CBC listener and fan).
I was in Toronto recently and at a meeting with Owlkids Books , they gave me a preview copy of The House at the End of the Road, my second book. This one is a kind of a picture book / graphic novel hybrid. It was edited by Karen Li and designed by Danielle Arbour. It is exciting to hold a printed copy.
First there are many “thumbnail” drawings made to figure things out. These are a few of them. (I thumbnail out the whole story before I start making any final illustrations.)
When I have settled on a thumbnail composition, I make a rough drawing like this one.
Next, I make the “final” line drawings. They are mostly drawn separately and layered on top of each other so that I can move things around until they look just right to me. (The rectangular lines around drawing are guides show the edge of the book and safe zones for text.)
Then, on the computer, I fill in flat colours under the line layers. Usually, it takes some experimenting before I am happy with the colours.
After that, I create some shade, shadows and highlights. These help add some dimension to the pictures.
At some point, I apply some texture that I have scanned in, and add extra colour here and there.
I also use coloured pencils, textured paper, watercolour, etc. to scan in and layer onto the images. Here, I used coloured pencils for texture and pattern, and some striped brown paper for the Duke’s suit.
Finally, here is what the illustration looks like with all the parts together!