Bob Marshall: Defender of the Wilderness Part 2

The process of illustrating Bob Marshall: Defender of the Wilderness

Hello friends,

In my last post I chatted about the research process of working on Bob Marshall: Defender of the Wilderness by Linda Elovitz Marshall. In this post, I’ll share my rough sketches for the book and how I took them to more refined lines which I could paint.

This was the first picture book I have illustrated that was completely digital. My previous two books, Charlie Russell and the Gnomes of Bull Head Lodge by Emily Crawford Wilson and The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde were both created in watercolor. Because the publisher, South Dakota Historical Society Press, asked me to use a different style, I thought I would switch mediums and make something that experimented with sharper edges and little soft shading, which has been my trademark up to this point. I happened to be studying a lot of Gary Kelley’s work before I started this project and I think I was definitely influenced by him.

I started sketching these in photoshop, working directly on top of the pagination that the marvelous book designer, Angela Gier provided for me.

Below you will see the more refined versions of these rough sketches which I show the client. My ACTUAL rough sketches are so rough that after some time passes, I don’t even know what they are anymore- they are literally just ovals and scribbles.

I feel like I am still learning the craft of illustration after graduating from a fine art painting program. So learning how to vary the pages is still a bit tricky for me. Finding the right beat is important, but I really love double page spreads that incorporate everything into one image. It was hard for me not to make every spread a double-pager.

After several back and forth conversations with the publisher I come up with more refined version of the sketches:

My compositional goal for these illustrations were to find a nice flow between the pages. The story is fast paced and factual, focusing on a lot of events in long paragraphs so I had to find a way to show everything happening without cluttering up the page too much. I spent a lot of time looking at the work of Dean Cornwall and Bob Peak and how they composed images.

Once I got the lines down I would do a rough value sketch.

And that is that for the sketching phase! In the next post, I’ll share more about the painting process. Thanks for tuning in! Let me know if you have any questions about the process!

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