Worth a thousand words
The process of creating an illustration truly brings meaning to the phrase that a picture is worth a thousand words. Illustrating my books was definitely much more time-consuming than writing, largely due to my lack of skill. Each illustration took many hours of effort, with the process ranging from exhilarating and satisfying to immensely frustrating — especially when I had to redo, and then redo again, to achieve a result that matched my imagination and expectations.
In the end, the effort was worth it, bringing my stories to life and providing some vital elements to the puzzles that are an integral feature of the series.
The early attempts
I began my illustrations the old-fashioned way — pencil on paper, followed by inking and then painting with watercolour pencils. This is an example of my first image, which I had planned to use on my contents page. While I was happy with the drawing, the result was less impressive when I used it in the book. The texture of the paper was evident and detracted from the image I wanted to present. The final image is the one I recreated using an illustration application called Procreate.
The second time around, I decided that a sunset would be more appropriate for the story. This was an easy change in Procreate — simply altering the sky and water layers of the image — without needing to redo the entire illustration.
Procreate
Purchasing Procreate and an Apple Pencil for my iPad mini was a game-changer. The ability to draw directly on my iPad meant that much of the sketching phase felt familiar, but the real transformation came from being able to use layers, reuse elements from other illustrations, and maintain a consistent colour palette for my characters. Creating an illustration became much easier and produced far superior results for me.
It is still a time-consuming process — I average about four hours per image. This is an example of bringing one of my illustrations to life, from reference photo to final artwork.
My first book contained over 90 images. I’ll leave it to you to work out how long that took me to complete!
