Pen and Ink
Ad Markers
Photoshop
To Iowa in the Back Seat is a children's book depicting the author's childhood memory of a special road trip. She provided me with the story along with photos of the real locations and people to be depicted in the book. Using these references, I designed stylized versions of the characters and settings, illustrated 29 pages, nine additional illustrations, the front and back covers, a coloring book page, and a large illustration for a photo-op background.
Process
After discussing the project with the author, I was provided with a lot of references to base the illustrations off of. Some are shown below.
Next, the author and I went through a long ideation phase. I showed her various illustration styles, plans for each page, and character designs.
After refining the previous ideas, I got to work, one page at a time. For each illustration I began with an ink drawing, then I colored it in with ad markers. Lastly, I polished, shaded, and edited the piece in Photoshop.
