Mimi's Newsletter - I Illustrated a Book! (Patreon)

Hello my beautiful flowers!

This is quite an exciting newsletter for me to write because last week I got the advance copies of the picture book I illustrated for HarperCollins! 🎉😍✨

It's called The Love That Grew and is written by Sarah Ayoub. The whole process has been a total dream come true and I'm really excited to share more details with you about the illustrations and how I made them when the book is released in March this year (yay!). In general though here's a little rundown of the process to give you a bit of insight into how things went:

The publisher reached out to me via email asking if I would be interested in illustrating a book for them

I said I was interested to know more (but was actually very sceptical because it seemed too good to be true and I did lots of research into them to see if it was legitimate or not 😅)

We had a chat on the phone about the project, and they were SUPER nice about it being my first book project and explained everything and answered all my questions

They sent me the rough text and an official offer to do the book, including some contract details and terms

I then signed a full contract which included royalty rates, advance payments, and schedule details

They sent me all the info I needed regarding illustration specs (image sizes, DPI, bleed margins etc) and were again super kind in explaining anything I wasn't sure of usually before I even had a chance to ask!

I then illustrated draft sketches of all the pages. They were really hands off and just let me illustrate the pages however I wanted to begin with, but said that if I wanted a brief or some help they'd be happy to be more involved

They then gave feedback on the sketches, and we tweaked a few things

Then they left me to illustrate the full colour illustrations for a month or two

I showed them the final illustrations and we made a few more tweaks

I then organised all of my working Photoshop files to be neat and tidy and passed them over to them

The book designer assembled my illustrations together with the text layout, and they sent me the final digital version of the book to review and make sure all my artwork was right

Once I'd approved it (along with the author and publisher) they sent it off to print and my job was done!

I received some advance copies of the book last week, and the book is fully released in March!

So that's pretty much been the process so far. From signing the contract in early June last year I had until September to finish the illustrations so about 3 full months to illustrate the 24 page book plus cover.

It's really nice to see the book in person, and I'm excited to show you more of the illustrations and how I developed them.

I've been doing a little less digital illustrating so far this month because I've been sorting out some other projects, doing some commissions (which I usually don't share publicly on social media) and also spent half of last week away from my computer. My partner Dan went for a cycling trip and I went and spent a night camping with him last Monday and then drove 3.5 hours to go and pick him up from the other side of the state last Friday so that took up a bit of my week!

It's nice though to have a flexible work schedule and sometimes be able to take a day away from the computer if I need to for personal reasons. 

I did get to do a bit of sketching though and there are some baby cows in the field next to us and they are SO CUTE so of course I had to do some cow-inspired sketching.

So that's been the start of my February! Going to do some more digital illustrating over the next couple of weeks, and am excited to make the Patreon benefits! I'm going to do the step-by-step guide first (starting that this afternoon), have some things I want to write about (I'm thinking a mini how-to tutorial with illustrating steps) and also of course will be doing another drawing video for Beautiful Bluebells.

If there's ever anything specific you'd like me to write about or show how to do in steps, please let me know! I want to make things that are useful to you so ask questions or make requests at any time 😊❤