Bob Marshall: Defender of the Wilderness Part 3

Painting the illustrations

Hello!

In the last couple of posts (here and here) I have talked about the process of illustrating Bob Marshall: Defender of the Wilderness by Linda Elovitz Marshall. I walked you through the research phase and the sketch phase and today I will show you how I painted a particular page of the book. I go more in depth about the book and my painting process over on my youtube channel if you would like to see more.

This is one of my favorite pages of the book:

I love painting fire, especially when it lights things from below, so this was a treat for me to work on. Painting light is one of my favorite things.

I used Adobe Fresco to paint this entire book. My method was to create a basic base shape and then use clipping masks to add details inside that shape with watercolor brushes and the live watercolor brushes, which were a blast to use. You can watch a short soundless time lapse here:

You can see how much the reference photos of Bob in the wilderness influenced this spread. I think that is one of the fun parts of working on non fiction projects- you can incorporate your research in a direct way without feeling unoriginal!

That’s it for this post- a short and sweet one this time. If you have any questions about the process of illustrating a non fiction picture book that I haven’t answered, please ask! I am more than happy to answer.

As always, thank you for reading!

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