Illustration Exploration

🗓️ 56 Days Until Publish

This week’s post is going to be more show and less tell. Ok, still a decent amount of tell. Regardless, this should be a fun one because today we are talking about illustrations!

When it comes to kids books, we all know that the illustrations are as, if not more, important than the story itself. Especially when it comes to the experience of the child. Funny, interesting or unique imagery captivate young readers and draw them deeper in the story. That’s why these were so daunting to me. Because they can make or break the story!

The first thing I focused on when I began the illustration process was the style of the horns. This is of course the name of the book and the focal point throughout the story. So I wanted to make sure I nailed these. I ended up drawing a bunch of different types of horns. Here are just a few I explored.

You can also vote for your favorite on LinkedIn.

Fun fact, when I first told the story, the horns that I had in my mind were reindeer horns…but reindeers don’t have horns…they have antlers…and The Boy With Antlers just didn’t have the same ring to me. But I digress…

As I mentioned in my last email, the final style for my book would be a comic book style. Knowing that, I still needed to figure out how I wanted to handle color. I did some samples using water colors, color pencils and eventually full color. Here are a couple of those.

These of course are just a some of the explorations I have done. And in some ways I am still finalizing the style so I would love to know what you think!

One of the biggest things I realized after doing these is that the boy in them looked too old. He looked more 15+ vs. 8-9. So big changes to him are coming as well!

Ok. Show and tell are done for now. More to come soon.

Thanks again for reading.

Kacy