Louise Loves Art

From Sketch to Final Art: Louise Loves Art

By Kelly Light

Louise loves art. She really loves to draw and that’s where this book started—with the very first drawings of Louise.

I sketch on vellum, which is a transparent paper. It allows me to layer drawings as I try to perfect them. I start my rough sketches in blue pencil and clean them up with Prismacolor colored pencils. The cleaned up drawings get scanned into my computer and then I work on them in Photoshop.

I lay out the sketches onto the pages of the book and work out the composition, thinking about how the art flows from page to page. I consider where the reader will look and how to keep areas open for type.

I decided to use color sparingly in the book to allow the drawings to really stand out. All of the white space on the pages echoes the whiteness of Louise’s own drawing paper and also that of my own sketch book pages. I wanted the black drawn lines and the red solid areas to be what guided the reader through the story. I wanted the whole book to feel like drawings.

One of the original drawings of Louise made it into the final book: It’s the first spread, where we meet Louise and get to know just how much she loves art.