I'm DONE penciling "Will & Whit!"

Hooray!!

 

 Ugh, penciling is the most frustrating and challenging part of the whole book production process for me. It requires endless decision making, visualizing the sets and character's movements, getting the characters consistent, designing the locations, rearranging layouts, drawing all those pesky hands and noses, etc. The past few weeks in particular it was getting really hard for me to stay focused with this summer weather, so I am really thankful that this step of the process is DONE.

Last week I took all the penciled pages on a field trip to the Abrams offices over in Manhattan. Check out my book baby, all 182 pages of drawings! It's taken me 3 months of being a hermit in my studio 7 days a week to draw it all out.

 Here's my editor Maggie Lehrman and art director Chad Beckerman, as they scrutinize the book.  I asked them to "look concerned" for this photo, despite the fact that they didn't have many critiques. (Thankfully!) It's a bit scary drawing out a whole book without someone else seeing it.

And I thought I should share a few of the FINISHED penciled pages! My scanner doesn't pick up the blue pencil that well, so these are photos even though they're not the best quality. Shrug.

Here's Will in her room working at her desk, when her shadows first appear. Will ended up looking nothing like my sample drawings of her!

 

Here's Will surprising Reese on her birthday, with her best friends Noel and Autumn...

 

  

Here's Will meeting the kids who are putting on the arts carnival: Blake, Ava, and Desmond.

In some sections I had a lot of fun with the layouts. For instance, when they go mattress rafting I used only trees and water ripples to divide up the panels.

So what's the INKING gonna look like? Well, here's a process shot from one of the first pages I've started inking just this weekend. Very undone, but you can get the idea.

We'll see where things go! It'll take me 3 more months to complete inking, so come November I'll have some more fun show-and-tell. Stay tuned!

 Currently Reading: A Wrinkle in Time (graphic novel)...written by Madeleine L'Engle, adapted and illustrated by Hope Larson