I am currently taking a class at the Pratt Fine Arts Center in Seattle! It’s on Picture Book Illustration, taught by the excellent Dana Sullivan!

I am loving it so far, and it’s been an excellent motivation to get going on my next book project, now that my Bird and Sheep manuscript is beginning to slowly make the rounds.

I thought I would share some of the work I’ve been doing on this new book, tentatively titled Ballad of the Penguin, though I’m not sure I like that title. For now the full text is still up here, though once I begin to shop this manuscript around I may take it down.

Here are some character studies and sketches:

Trying out different poses, trying to get Penguin down to a simple series of shapes that I can draw quickly and consistently. Getting there!

Tern chick!

Mama Tern.

First storyboard with thumbnail sketches. I don’t know how I did without this for Bird and Sheep! It’s SO helpful in planning out each page. A lot will likely change, but this was my first attempt at getting the story laid out with illustration ideas on 32 pages. I’m pleased with how well it fits! It’s also good practice for keeping the sketches REALLY loose and not caring at this point how they look. If I tried to meticulously draw each thumbnail I would be working on this thing for hours. As it was it only took me about an hour, and that long only because I had to stop and think about how I wanted each page to be set up. The next challenge will be to keep the larger sketches just as “loose” feeling.

I just thought that after all that, Penguin might be ready for a bit of a break.

The more I work on this project, the more excited I get about it. I am learning so much about picture book illustration these days, and I’m really looking forward to implementing some cool tricks I’ve learned.