Literati Poster Process

I was so excited back in September 2021 when Literati contacted me to make some artwork for their December box. A project that involves children’s products, illustration and books? Thats exactly my wheelhouse, sign me up!

After reading through their project pitch, negotiating fees and signing contracts (and getting banking info and w2s set up) It was time to get to work.

RESEARCH PHASE
Most of the time I head to Pinterest for research and I did a bit of that, but recently Iv’e been feeling like my art and themes are following too closely with what everyone else is doing. It’s not something I do on purpose but it does happen to the best of us. So this time I headed to the National Gallery of Art’s open access catalogue which is amazing. They’re all public domain images. Such a great place to find inspiration outside of the usual.
I also hadn’t done any pieces with snow before so I needed some reference.
Here is a piece I especially liked.

SKETCH PHASE
They needed 3 sketches to choose from but I made way more than that. Maybe you’re better at figuring out what direction you want to go but for me, I’ve gotta wander around a bit first. I didn’t love any of these. I almost loved the skating one but I’ve been really into gooses lately and I wanted something a bit more unexpected and magical.
I liked this piece below but it also didn’t feel quite right.

Finally! I sent this sketch off with two others but let my AD know this one was my favorite. Thankfully she also loved this one best! Woo! You never know if that’s gonna happen or not but I got so lucky! At this point I added in the color you see and we finalized the palette up more.

TRANSFERING
I LOVE working on my Ipad Pro and Procreate for sketch phase. It makes a lot of things easier and clearer for me and my AD but transferring the image to my watercolor paper… Oh man it’s a process that I don’t enjoy. 1. It’s boring 2. It’s boring and 3. It always takes longer than I think. Thankfully I’ve got the process down pat so I can throw on a Podcast and listen to whatever murdery-horror I want to make the time pass.

PAINTING PHASE
MY FAVORITE PART. Mostly because it’s interesting but also I can throw on a show or podcast and just zone out. I LOVE PAINTING. If I could just paint all day I’d be a happy camper indeed.

This is the part though where I went “Oh heck, I haven’t figured out how to draw a train yet.” and so it was back to some research and tracing. I looked at the flying car scene from Harry Potter, some drone footage of flying over trains and just some Google results of trains. Could you tell I wasn’t comfortable with drawing a train? I can. But it turned out fine! Better than expected actually!

After painting there was still some extras to add on digitally, the snowflakes and text, some edits my AD wanted, colors to change in post and I did a lot of toning down the background.
You can see the final image turned out a lot warmer than my color sketch!
Let me know if you’d like to hear more about any specific part of my process.