New Book and Lessons Learned

 I recently had the wonderful opportunity to Illustrate and design "A Girl Named Gitta,” a series of stories about the childhood of Brigitta Straumer Clyde.

I will be writing more about how I got the job, and why I chose to illustrate a self-published book in a future post. Here I want to share something I learned about the process of illustrating a book and meeting deadlines.

Yesterday, while discussing procrastination and burnout in one of my classes, a student of mine shared the idea that we should do the vanilla first and then make the banana split. As I thought about this profound statement about getting the basics done and then if you have time, you add the topping, I realized that is how I approached this book. 

In order to meet deadlines at a very busy time of my life, I got out the basics first. For example, in the image below I got the idea out. 

I wasn't happy with it. I knew it could be better, but I had to get something done. At this point I didn't know how to fix it, so I submitted the preliminary black and white image. At this point this was one of my least favorite pages. The authors were happy with it, but I knew it could be better. 

Once I was finished with the line drawing for the whole book, I went in and reworked my least favorite images. This was the result.

I then went on to the next image I was not happy with and found a better solution. I used this process until each page was at a point I could be happy with. 

So, if you are overwhelmed with too much to do, do the basics first. Then if you have time, add the good stuff.