Here's a peek at some of the finished artworks for The Cow Jumped Over the moon (A Nursery Rhyme Emergency) by Jeanne Willis. I've been working on these, off and on, for almost a year and a half and now they are all finished (well, even now there might be a small change but I have to draw the line somewhere!)
It will be published by Walker Books next year.
Now I'm concentrating on another picture book which I've been working on for about the same length of time. Honestly, I'm actually pretty fast when it comes to illustrating, but for this one the writing duties are mine too, and what seemed like a beautifully simple idea is still proving really difficult to get into a straight line.
I'm tinkering with some ideas for longer illustrated fiction again, but that's sure to be a slow burner even by the standards demonstrated above.
I'm also still posting up general sketches and experiments, but they're going straight onto my tumblr here. As of about a month ago it is all new stuff there, but as an archive it goes back about five years.
6 comments:
Beautiful, beautiful pictures...
These look fantastic Joel! And what a brilliant idea for a book that is!
Thanks! It's been through a lot of iterations (started out a novelty book with holes etc) but it was always such a fun idea. Next time black line though, hopefully. Subtle sepia takes me forever!
Fantastic blog and I love your work. Can I ask you what you personally consider a long time to illustrate a picture book? It's something that I tend to fixate on. I consider myself slow and spend (and probably waste) a lot of time berating myself for working too slowly. Social media gives an impression that people are making books so fast. I am just finishing a novelty book (slightly more drawings than my picture books maybe) and the final art has taken me four months, full throttle, working on basically that alone. This is my fastest for final art yet but still seems very slow in the grand scheme of things. Is this something you think or worry about?
Thanks Sheena, The finished artwork for this took about three months (full on), but if you factor in the concentrated time spent developing it then that's probably closer to six months or more. There were a lot of changes to the text and the format which meant the whole thing took more than a year and a half, but that was out of my hands. This was only ok because I was not pressuring myself about income, taking a break after finishing the tv show.
I worry more about the time it takes me to develop things. Layouts etc. And to write. That stuff takes me forever, and I wish I was faster. Also worrying is how slow publishers seem to be these days. I'm in the habit of changing the way that I do things, so it can be very difficult to predict how long finished stuff will take. The computer sometimes makes me fast because I can fix stuff. Sometimes slower because I can fix stuff, again and again and again.
Sorry, I forgot about this until now, yes the development stuff takes ages too. And publishers are so slow, I agree, my god. When you spread the advance out over the timeframe it's kind of demoralising. Anyway, keep up the great work!
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