Written by Brianne Mitchell
Illustrated by Sian Bowman
You can purchase a copy of the book here.
For this book series, I have started with raw ideas as pen and paper. Then when the illustrator was finished, I was given the high-resolution scans. I have then cleaned up all the images. Some of this is very subtle work. Essentially I have cleaned up and removed any extra drops of paint, the pencil marks and any artefacts from scanning. I cleaned up anything that distracted from the images. For some images, I had to do more in order to achieve the desired outcome.
Example of the cleaning up are above. The trickiest edits were using a body from one image and the hair from another to create a composite image. There was also spaces for adding text to the map but there was not always a good amount of space so this required some dramatic edits.
Another area that required some dramatic watercolor editing was to the cover. The cover needs to have maximum contrast to aid readability. So I have faded out the background image on the back cover. The insert in the top right shows this. Another big edit to the front cover was moving the bird and sun from behind the book’s name to up in the top left and right corners of the front cover.