My Guest Blogger Today is Carrie Kimmel,

showing us how to illustrate a children’s book with fabric, a little sewing and using the computer.

Carrie:  Hi Donna! I am so excited to do a guest post. Thank you so much for the opportunity! I love looking at your books and I always think its fun to share ideas!

To explain the way I illustrate on the computer, I would like to describe the steps I used to create this particular illustration:


I had a lot of fun with this illustration and it is one of my favorite. I use Pages from iWork to create my illustrations, but I believe you could use the same technique in other programs as well.




For the sky in the background, I used a snapshot of some blue fabric from my sister’s shop.

For the water, I drew a shape that I thought resembled water.

Then I “masked” the image with a snapshot of another piece of fabric from my sister’s shop. I also added a shadow to the fabric.

I copied and pasted the water multiple times. I varied the size and brightness of each layer to give the water some dimension.

Next, I varied the opacity of each layer of water. And trimmed the edges of the water for a perfect rectangle background. Now my background is complete!

Now for my subject, whales! First, I asked my sister to take a few snap shots of the whale she created:

For this particular illustration, I used the 3rd and 4th images featured above.

I used my mouse to trace and cut out the whale’s tail from one image and the whale’s face from the other image.

Then I rotated the tail and layered the images to

make them look like one whale:




For multiple whales, I copied and pasted the same whale. I varied the sizes (length and width) of each whale.

I also varied the colors using the Adjust image tool in my Pages program.

Pages from iWork is a program that runs on the Mac computer. Mac providers describe Pages to be similar to Word which is the word processing program for Microsoft.

I bought a mac a little over a year ago and this technique has taken me time to figure out all by trial and error. I’ve gotten faster at it as I practice more and more using the different tools in Pages. I use the “Draw with Pen” tool and the “Mask with selected shape” tool to make the different shapes and cut outs. There is definitely a learning curve and I have gotten quicker at it as time goes on.

Thanks again for the awesome opportunity to share ideas and a love for children’s stories.

You can see more illustrations and the complete story of The Little Pink Whale here.

For more info about how I draw in Pages or any other questions,

please email me at madebybedtimetales@Gmail.com

Donna:
Thank you, Carrie Kimmel for sharing your illustration techniques using fabric and iWork.  Thank you also to Becka her sister, the seamstress-blogger at http://www.MadeByBedTimeTales.  What an innovative art form! 

Be sure to read the story of The Little Pink Whale…so-sew sweet..so-sew clever…so-sew fresh!