I was so delighted when my friend Amanda Bankert asked me to illustrate her cookbook Voilà Vegan: 85 Decadent, Secretly Plant-Based Desserts from an American Pâtisserie in Paris (Avery) now available wherever books are sold. How does one crack the nut and find the visual concept for something vast like a whole goshdarn book? To celebrate the release of this fabulous new green cookbook, I want to share how I broke it all down in 3 easy steps.
Map it out. When I am working with an art director (the person who commissions an illustration), they send over a brief with the idea of the story/book/article to illustrate, a moodboard of reference images and some inspiration images either from my own portfolio or another artist’s. In this case, I was working directly with author Amanda. Amanda has loved my unfiltered visualizations of Paris: pigeons a-flock, Old World odors, and all the high/low contradictions of living in a Metropolitan capital. My job was to find the right mashup of Marie-Antoinette aesthetics and Right Bank funk.
Before I could start sketching, I needed to give myself some structure to ignite the creative process. Last week I shared my holy trinity of framing an illustration, always identifying the client, existing imagery and conflict/concept. I usually like to write out my ideas or jot down a mindmap to get a basic structure in place about the essentials of the project. This gives me an idea of everything the book will and won’t be.
Once I had the concept fleshed out, then I started doing my own visual research. Usually if I found the right visual, the idea would come quickly (see how extravagent 18th century headpieces below could easily evolve into a wall of pastry-headed royalty). Once I had a black and white sketch, I would send it over to Amanda to see her thoughts before I committed to doing it in watercolor.
Stay organized. Yes, even the most creative savant needs to keep an Excel doc every now and then. Keep a record of how many illustrations you will need and how they will be highlighted in the book. This will keep you on schedule and prevent you from overproducing. Also give yourself the grace that not everything will thematically work together. You can always count of scrapping a few illustrations that don’t serve a purpose or are redundant in the mix.
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Stay inspired, dear reader. And don’t drink the watercolor water. -jkw