From sketch to finish...

Recently during my school visits I have been doing workshops where more and more kids are telling me they like to express themselves with drawing and art in collaboration with other students who can write well.  Lot's of dynamic-duos are creating comic strips, small books and stories and ideas.  I thought it would be fun to see a little process here.  When I write a story, it is generally chock full of details, illustrative ideas, which a talented illustrator is then able to translate into pictures to make my words come alive.  The sketches below, on the left are actually quite finished, but generally an illustrator does numerous revisions to get to that point.  THEN, on the right, the color is added and the images come alive! 

In some cases with these examples, I turned in hundreds of descriptive words to go with the rhyming text and then was able to throw my words away when the pictures depicted them so well.

These pictures, drawn by the wonderfully talented Mark Ludy were drawn with a bic pen and scanned, then colored on a computer in InDesign.  Very cool process and quite different from other illustrator's techniques in some of my other books.