How I Illustrated a Classic Cover

down the "rabbit hole" of process

Oct 17, 2023

Hi! I’m Kayla Stark, an illustrator working primarily in the children’s publishing world. You’re reading “Odd Thoughts”, my blog/newsletter where I talk mostly about illustration, process, publishing, and anything else that’s tangentially related in my life. Join in! Everyone’s welcome!

What’s up everyone!? I didn’t want to rush the post I’m currently writing (on querying literary agents). SO, to make sure I can give that the time it needs, I’m sharing a pretty in-depth process post from the archives today. There are probably a lot of you who haven’t seen this before—it’s lived on the measly, little blog page on my website for nearly two years. 😅 I’ve grown A LOT and gotten much better, imo, since this, but I still pretty much use the same process.

Some of my favorite jobs over the past couple years are a growing list of classic book cover illustrations for Arcturus Publishing. For this process breakdown I’ll focus on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. (I dug into the process of The Jungle Book over on my Instagram if you want to read about that one.) From now on, I’ll be sharing the longer process posts here. I can share wayyyy more here than I can with 10 Instagram carousel images. :)

The Brief & Thumbnails

It all starts with a good brief and thumbnail sketches. From the brief, I know a few things that are important when considering the composition. The character MUST be in the center so she is seen through the outer die cut shape, and I can’t have any other important elements too close to her. If I do, they will be seen through the die cut and will A) be cropped really weird and B) spoil the full illustration reveal when lifting the outer cover.

Keeping this in mind (along with the few other pieces of art direction from the brief) I get going on thumbnail sketches. I always always always do thumbnail sketches. It is NOT a waste of time, I repeat, NOT a waste of time. I recommend everyone fill a whole page with just thumbnail sketches when beginning a project. It helps you navigate through the “low-hanging fruit” of ideas and find your best, most interesting solution. I keep these small, so I can’t get caught in the details. I’m only looking at shape, scale, and value (somewhat). I do these in marker or pen so I can’t erase. Again the idea is go go go, get as many down as possible.

Here are a few examples from my thumbnailing stage. I was going for British, formal rose garden and looked up reference images to guide me in that respect (below). Can you spot all of the parts these images inspired in the final? :)

A Helpful Exercise for Generating Thumbnails
If you are having trouble coming up with different thumbnails, try setting a timer for 15-20min. Your goal is to fill up your page with thumbnails before the timer beeps. Sometimes that pressure of racing the clock can free your mind a bit and helps to limit overthinking.

Bonus Info: Sketching at the Zoo

I was at our local zoo and took the opportunity to do a few flamingo studies. I knew I’d be drawing one with Alice and I thought it would be fun and beneficial to do a little life drawing. It helped! I paid close attention to the shapes that make up a flamingo and how their neck bends around in impossible ways. They seemed to all do a few common postures.

I used a pink marker and quickly did a page of gestures. I think I could have sat all day drawing them and been happy.

Sketching and Refining

After thumbnailing I choose a direction, in this case combining a few thumbnails into one composition, and begin refining the sketch. Doing this stage on the iPad makes me much faster as I can, undo, move things around, and change the scale of any bit on the fly. I spend a long time figuring out placements for the characters and background elements (#1 below). Then I go over that rough sketch to refine my line work and begin adding details. (#2 below) I don’t always show the client sketches this tight/fully rendered, but in this case it worked for my process and I wanted to ensure minimal edits. (I used the default 6B Pencil in Procreate.)

Before I send the sketch off to the client, I find it’s helpful to do a quick value study. (#3 above) I quickly lay in a rough grayscale map of the shadows, midtones, and highlights. It helps me later when I get to the painting stage and I find it’s nice for showing how I plan to lead the viewer’s eye around the finished piece. (Without it your eyes might get lost in all of the lines.) I used the Vivibrush ‘Watercolor Hard Edge’ here.

Above is the a timelapse of the whole sketching phase from rough layout to value study.

Color Study

I learned through trial and error that it’s helpful (at least for me) to do a color study before jumping into the final painting. I can play around with the tone and mood of a piece with the swipe of an Apple pencil. Doing a preliminary digital color study saves a lot of time and redoing in the end—not to mention it also saves a whole heck of a lot of paint!

I found a color chart for Faber-Castell’s Polychromos colored pencils and a color chart for Caran D’Ache’s Neocolor II crayons. (I was using gouache as well, but didn’t pull a color chart for it, I felt I had enough to work with from these two) and quickly blobbed color down. I didn’t need to be exacting in my placement, it’s just a guide.

A Digital Color Tip
I can get lost in the infinite sliders and possibilities of digital color, SO to avoid analysis paralysis, here’s a trick I figured out. :) Copy and paste a color chart from your favorite art supply brand’s website—ideally the brands and medium you’ll be using for your final. Then use your color eyedropper ONLY on those options. Viola!

Painting

Now it’s on to the painting. FINALLY, right? I wish I took more photos during this part, arguably the most visually exciting, but I only got a few. I’ll do my best to describe the process! The colors of the painting eded up being slightly different than in my study. I attribute that to slightly changing my mind on the fly (adding in a little more blue globally) and it’s hard to mix paint to match a digital screen ya’ll. However, doing the color study gave me the guide and confidence I needed to begin putting paint on paper.

In the process shot above, you can see I printed the sketch (sans value layer) onto my watercolor paper. See the sketch lines in the card soldiers? I lowered the opacity to approximately 10%, but I think I should have gone even lighter. I knew the gouache would be opaque enough to cover the ink and wasn’t too worried about it showing through.

I start with my largest areas, knowing I’d have to mix the most paint for those—I didn’t want to remix those colors on a different day. I don’t care if I have to remix and it doesn’t match exactly, I just didn’t want to do it twice. :) Getting the larger areas of color and shapes filled in helps me get a sense of how the color and composition are working together. All the while I’m keeping texture and color variation in mind. I think it adds visual interest to the piece and helps lead the eye around. I used Holbein arcyla gouache and Neocolor II crayons layered together.

Quite a lot happened here. I dove into the character shapes and even started adding some details in their hair and clothing. I also painted leaf shapes into the rose bushes, prepping to add the blooms. The roses are actually white roses painted red in the story, I mapped out a few to “leave white” in the illustration. The finer details in the clothing are mostly done with colored pencil and neocolor II crayons as I have more control over them, but I did try using a tiny brush and gouache for Alice’s face.

Again I want texture and color variation throughout and keep that in mind while painting the smaller shapes and areas. I’m mostly working back to front, big to small.

The two above images are close ups before I scanned it. In this illustration it’s all about the layering. Gouache went down first and then color pencil and neocolor II crayons add in extra detail and texture on top. I used them for shadows, stems, texture, a colored highlight, etc. I like how they pick up and show the roughness of the thicker gouache layers.

The crayons are water soluble—I sometimes grab a brush with a little water and blend them into the surrounding colors. There are so many ways you could layer these mediums. I feel I was a little too reserved and wish I would have been heavier handed in applying them over the gouache. Next time! Always learning and analyzing. :)

Above is the unedited scan - My scanner tends to lose yellows and add magenta, as you can see. It’s very different from the physical piece. I’m not the most confident painter when it comes to small details and important areas (like faces). So I do the best I can (to practice), knowing one day I’ll get there and also knowing I can fix it digitally. :) With this illustration (and all of the others in this series) I went absolutely as far as I could traditionally. I wanted to do minimal digital edits and additions. Not only does this save time in the end giving me less areas on which to futz around; it’s a personal goal I set for these.

Digital Details and Edits

I brought the scanned painting into Procreate on my iPad to make the digital edits. As I said before, I didn’t to do a lot digitally. Just enough to give it some polish and add that extra little 5-10% of oomph.

For anyone curious on how I get the scanned painting into Procreate:
I export a high res file to my google drive (usually a JPEG); open the google drive app on my ipad; select the file; and choose “open in Procreate”; it automatically imports the file and it’s there the next time I open Procreate. :)

Above is the final illustration! Tada!
I added/edited just a few things digitally: some subtle shadows; the paint drips on the roses; the Cheshire Cat’s smiling face; the extra water texture in the fountain; and heavily edited Alice’s face and hair. I mostly used the Vivibrush watercolor hard edge brush and a gouache brush from a midcentury pack by Retro Supply.

Here (below) is 45 second-ish timelapse of the digital edits if you want to watch me do them in record time. Watch closely, sometimes it’s tough to see where I’m editing. :)

There were quite a few back and forth edits for Alice’s eyes. We wanted to get them just right—an expression of shock and delight at playing croquet with a flamingo mallet and hedgehog ball.

Starting with the top left and ending with the bottom right, you can see how many variations were tried. It’s pretty ding dang amazing how much an expression can change just from pupil size and the subtlest change of eye placement.

And there you have it! I send the final file to the client on the template they provided (PSD file plus a high res TIFF). They work their type and pattern magic for the outer cover and we have ourselves an extra special book cover.

That’s all for this project! Thanks for sticking with me to the end. This was fun! Plus I think it’s helpful to reflect on and analyze projects. I hope to do more of these process breakdowns and I hope to find my voice and comfort in writing about them.

If you read through and something sparked a question please don’t hesitate to ask! Or if something was unclear, let me know! You can leave a comment below; email me at kayla.l.stark@gmail.com; or reach out via Instagram @kayla_stark.

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I appreciate your time and support! Have a wonderful week ahead, wishing you all the best!