Making a Book

Left: A portion of the colored pencil sketch for the salamander page. Right: An ink drawing of Luna looking at Pumpkin Seed Fish.

Draft Drawings

"Remember what I said about editing and doing your best work? The same applies to drawing beautiful illustrations. Practice, practice, practice. When I am doing the illustrations for a book, I work with an art editor who does the same job as the text editor, only she works with the illustrators instead of the authors. Her name is Muffy, and it is her job to get the illustrators to do their best work. That means she wants to have an idea of how the art is going to look before I go to all the trouble of painting a finished illustration only to find out that the kids in the boat need to be wearing life jackets. Or that there is no room for the text. That's no fun.

"When I first started making books, I used to have to draw the sketches for each page, copy them, and then mail them to my art editor. A week later we would talk about them on the phone, and then I would have to do more sketches. It was pretty slow. Thanks to the internet, however, those days are long gone. When I was doing the illustrations for Salamander Rain, I found a much faster way to show the drafts to Muffy. Now instead of snail mailing them, I simply scan the drafts and load them up on a secret website that only my editors can see. Five minutes later Glenn and Muffy can look at them and tell me what they think. I have saved loads of time with this new system."

~Kristin Joy Pratt-Serafini, author/illustrator