Narrative Illustration - Process Research

Now that I have read the book and have an understanding of at least some of the work, I now need to think about how I am going to illustrate the scenes. To gain a better understanding of the process, I am going to be looking at established artists and the processes they use to achieve their finished designs.

Dan Yaccarino

Dan was born in Montclair NJ, and attended Otis-Parson school of design and graduated from Parsons school of design. He had worked freelance and for a number of publishers, his freelance clients include, New York Times, Rolling Stones, Business Week, The Boston Globe and many more.

He has illustrated a number of childrens books as well as writing his own. Titles include Big Brother Mike, Bam, Bam, Bam, One hole in the Road and Goodnight Mr. Night.

He has taught at Parsons school of Visual Arts and Montclair State College and exhibited work in a number of shows including a one man show at the Dance Theatre Workshop Gallery.

Dan has won a number of awards for his work, including Communication Arts, American Illustration, How International Design Annual, Society of Illustrators and Studio Magazine.

Dan Yaccarino



 

Dan Yaccarino - Process

 

 



• Interpretation of the script. He does this by breaking the story into pieces, identifying the 'peaks' of the story and the relationship between the illustrations and the text.

• Sketching and Thumbnails. All sketching and rough work is done using 'inconsequential paper'. This being cheap and if mistakes are made, the work can be discarded without any care for the materials lost. Ideas begin here and its important to keep energy levels and enthusiasm high.
• Colour palate is kept simple.
• Using one large piece of paper, Dan blocks out the 32 pages deciding what goes where, working out the rhythm of single and full page spreads.
• Once this page is done,it can be cut up and rearranged.

• Here Dan is playing with several different fonts, trying to decide which one to use.

 

• The pages of the book are then printed on Xerox paper and cut up. Here Dan then plays around with the composition of each page, altering the layout until he is happy with the look and flow.
• This 'dummy book' is then presented to the editor and art director who look at each page and feed back any changes they feel need to be made.
• Once everything is approved, Dan can then start to create the finally illustrations. This is when he uses the more expensive Arches 300-pound cold press paper which comes in 30-40inch sheets. He cuts these down to 11-15inch pages, which is the size of the book.

•  Sketching is done using a very light pencil and colour is applied.
• To finish, Dan uses a gentle gum eraser to eliminate any unnecessary guide lines or pencil marks. Each page taking roughly 1-2hours.
• If any thing needs changing at this stage, a whole page would need to be redone. 

Patrice Barton - Sweet Moon Baby

 

 

 



Sweet Moon Baby is an adoption story, written by Karen Henry Clarke and illustrated by Patrice Barton.

Patrice has such a beautiful, loose style when it comes to sketching which is still present in the final images. It's dream-like and wistful. She starts off very loose and rough drawings and builds up over and around them with tracing paper.

She too uses thumbnails and partial pieces to develop the layout and composition. The colour palate is bright and vibrant in the finished illustrations, but the work she shows to the editor for confirmation are black and white but still have a lot of depth and tone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxn6fJms_JM

The above link is a short video in which Patrice explains her process and shows off some of the beautiful sketches as well as the finished book.