Wednesday, September 14, 2011

Book Illustration Steps of Patrice Barton

I found something wonderful to share with you. It was on Mark Mitchell's blog "How to be a children's illustrator". He did a very great job putting this together! 
If you missed it, here it is in a nutshell. 
He had the opportunity to interview Patrice Barton; 
This is her process:
When illustrating a book, she plows into sketches, often working on tracing paper to discover her characters.
She’ll place tracing paper over her drawings and sketch on it to build her compositions and scene interactions.  Much of this work she’ll throw away. The “keepers” she’ll puzzle out out how to fit into her scene composites.
Her process  involves trial and error and a lot of drawing before she comes up with the images that (she feels) will do the best job of bringing the page to life.
Patty likes to show her editors black and white value studies of her sketches (painted on the computer in Corel Painter) before she works out the story’s visual flow, pace and page turns in a series of experimental dummies of various sizes.
When everyone has signed off on her monochromatic sketches she brings her line drawings (that she had scanned into Photoshop into Corel Painter and paints them in color.

I was so surprised she did this in Corel Painter, fascinating! I wish she would show us her steps in Corel Painter! That would be fun, but this is very useful too!
Click on these 2 links to watch her steps:
Children's book Illustrator Patrice Barton talks about "Sweet Moon Baby" - Part 1
Children's book illustrator Patrice Barton talks about "Sweet Moon Baby"- Part 2

Double page spread from "Sweet Moon Baby" by Karen Henry Clark, illustrated by Patrice Barton

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for your synopsis of Patrice Barton's work activities here. This has been helpful to me.

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