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KATIE GIGLIOTTI
Children's Picture Book Author & Illustrator
THE GIRAFFE WHO LOVED SCHOOL
Check out the process of illustrating from start to finish!
IDEA SKETCHES
Since this was a first for me, I began by speaking with the author of the book, my friend Tori Gelbert. She had a vision, and I was in charge of making that vision come to life.
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First, I found out the text that would be in the book. Then, I went page by page and chatted with her about what she wanted to see, where she felt the words needed to go.
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We also had to talk about characters, and figure out what she thought the main character, the giraffe, would look like.
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From there, I took her ideas and came up with some character sketches, as well as a few rough sketches of some pages. After each page, I would send her a picture and she would approve, or ask me to change a few things.
BOOK DUMMY
After I got the okay on the character sketches and rough ideas, I began to format a book dummy. Traditionally, this should be done multiple times, but since she approved most of my ideas, I didn't have to do multiple dummies.
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I did, however, have to change some pages and swap them out.
FINAL ART
This was the longest part of the process for this book, since I chose to do the artwork by hand. After measuring out and drawing each page, I had to then paint them with watercolors. Which meant, if I made a mistake, I'd have to re-do the entire page!
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After all the pages were finished, I also did a few small paintings that were featured throughout the book.
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Then, the artwork was scanned in, cropped, edited, and emailed to the author. Usually, illustrators also do the formatting and typesetting, but the author wanted to be in charge of this step.