Smile, Sophia: Making the art
Smile, Sophia: Making the art
My second picture book, Smile, Sophia came out in 2022. If you’re not familiar with it yet, here’s a quick blurb about the book:
Sophia loves finding fossils and digging up dinosaur bones. But she doesn’t love the way all the grown-ups just want her to smile. She’ll smile when she has something to smile about! In this picture book by Skylaar Amann, a young girl shows that being strong, and smart, and really good at what she does is more than enough—and if she smiles, it’s because she wants to!
A finished picture book looks a certain way, but so much goes into to making it, and a lot changes during development. Here’s a quick look at the making of the art throughout the process.
Above is a the first sketch I made of Sophia when I was starting to explore her character and personality. I liked her being a bit grumpy and rough around the edges because she doesn’t conform to what society expects her to be.
Tightening a composition
Now here’s an example of a sketch that was pretty clean and figured out during the dummy stage (a dummy is a rough version of a picture book), but I ended up closing up the space and bringing the characters closer for the final.
Revamping a scene
On the other hand, here’s an example where the illustration changed a lot. My original was very simple and focused on the two main characters of the scene, and I had envisioned it with a white background.
But with art direction, this page changed to include Sophia’s class. So it went from an individual photo to a class photo. It was a ton of work to draw and color this crowd (lol) but it let me add some additional humor and detail, and to contrast the kids’ approaches to picture day with Sophia’s approach.
Zooming in and filling out details
Here’s another page that changed in a similar way. I basically just zoomed in on the character and removed the circle inset. (Let’s ignore how bad Sophia’s pose is in the dummy version, lol.)
It was super fun to add all the elements in the dirt as well. (Shout out to my boy, Tiktaalik!)
Moving elements and redrawing things
Sometimes, art changes are more complex and involved adding or removing whole pages or moving one page to another place in the book.
These two pages, for example, had some elements rearranged on the pages or even moved to other pages as the text changed.
Now, here’s a look at the final version of these two pages.
Dummies
Another thing you might be able to see in these sketches is that some of the elements get a lot more refined over time. I had even rougher sketches at earlier stages, but the nice thing about making a picture book dummy is that the sketches don’t have to be perfect. It’s helpful to have a couple pages that convey what final art could look like, and for the rest of the sketches to show strong compositions, poses, and emotions—but you can typically convey that without going to super final-looking images.
Are you interested in learning more from me about picture book process or dummies in general? Leave me a comment and let me know!