So the illustrations for ‘Mad Grandad’s Doppelganger’ are done. Actually, they’ve been done for a couple of weeks, but it’s taken me that long to get round to this post.
I was hard up against the deadline and it involved a lot of late nights – not helped by a lovely one-year-old who has developed a nasty habit of turning into a narky insomniac demon in the early hours of the morning. 
But the book has now gone to print, and the O’Brien Press plan to have it in the shops for World Book Day in March.
For those of you who have never seen an illustration in the works, I’m posting the three main stages of a pic here.
1. The ‘thumbnail’ sketch: This is where I plan out what’s happening in the picture. I don’t worry about how the drawing looks. I’m just laying out the basic shape and composition (where things are in the pic). This is important, as you don’t want to be making decisions about the composition once you get into drawing details.
2. The pencil rough: This is where I draw the picture out properly. 
As you can see from the picture, I decided to add a few more elements at this stage, but the essential composition has remained the same. I’m often caught for time on this type of work – and I’d be pretty fast – so I don’t do too many versions of each picture. Even so, sometimes I have to have a few goes at it to get it right. While my pencils are quite sketchy, other people literally draw the pencil stage as tightly as the ink itself, and then simply go over with ink afterwards. Mark Oliver, a picture book illustrator and commercial artist, does thumbnails that are almost as finished as my pencil drawings.
3. The ink, or finished drawing: I’m still tightening up bits of the drawing at this stage, but others do all the tidying at the pencil stage. 
Each to their own. The inked version is done on a new sheet of paper, so you don’t see the pencil lines. A scanner will pick up the marks left by rubbed-out pencil lines, so it’s best to work on a clean sheet. I have a light box in my desk that allows me to trace the pencil rough onto heavy duty cartridge paper. I use various different marking points to ink, but with the Mad Grandad illustrations, it’s almost all done with an old-fashioned dip-pen, the type you have to dip in a bottle of ink. If I make a mistake at this stage, it’s more serious. I can cover up small mistakes with white paint, or else I have to start the ink drawing again.
These pen nibs I use are becoming harder and harder to find as this style of work gives way to digital art. A lot of illustrators already ink black & white stuff on computer. I’ve been working on a Mac (and sometimes a PC) for most of my career – on Photoshop especially. But one of the advantages of working on your own books is that you can have a lot more control. I still like the feel of paper under my fingers, the scratch of the pen and getting the amount and consistency of the ink right.
And painting is even more involved. Mixing the right colours and tones, seeing how different paints behave and what brushes leave what marks, is a kind of active meditation. The way publishing is going, I will have to get myself a stylus and graphics tablet soon, and start using painting software. But I baulk at the thought of having to give up doing it all in the real world.
Maybe it’s the old-fashioned part of me, but I still like illustrations that you can hang on a wall if you want to, where you can see how the mistakes have been covered up, where characteristics of the paper and the pen or pencil or brush can be seen if you look closer. You can see how those different materials and substances interact, and the artist’s skill in manipulating them. I like knowing that the artist’s fingerprints, even their DNA, can be found on that surface.
I love living in the digital age, but there are some things that just can’t be saved on disc.
