A Peek Inside: Sophie’s Stories, Part 2/2

Sketches and progress for the cover.

Thanks for coming back for part two of the making of “Sophie’s Stories”!

You may not know it seeing the final spreads with everything pulled together so nicely, but getting there wasn’t easy. Especially early on, I worked through a lot of doubt and hesitancy while illustrating the book. When I look through my painted spreads, the early ones are much lighter, with color not extending as far as it should, or with an overall unfinished appearance. I was having to go back with digital tools to carry them through. And this was really frustrating! As the work continued, I was able to push through a lot of the fear that I was messing it all up and create some finished spreads that I was happy with. Usually this meant I had to make some very ugly pieces, and also many multiples of spreads, until I had the look I was going for.

From rough sketch to painted art (gouche/watercolor/color pencil), to digitally finished final art.

The finished spread with text…it’s always magical to see the finished art in the book, with the words, on gorgeous paper.

The struggle is all just part of the process, but I think it’s important to share as it can feel really humbling when what you’re aiming for takes so long to reach (and maybe you never reach it, but come up with something totally different that’s actually a better fit!). I also had my wonderful art director, Zoë Tucker, pushing me along, with extraordinarily helpful insights and suggestions for how to solve those challenging parts.

Another view of my work flow for this project…first, a rough sketch in procreate, then a traditional/digital sketch, then a refined sketch with pencil, followed by painted art on paper, and lastly the final art finished in procreate and photoshop.

The story was originally based on 5 children’s books/stories/poems - “Over in the Meadow”, “The Thousand and One Nights”, “Alice in Wonderland”, “The Jungle Book”, and “The Owl and the Pussycat”. “Over in the Meadow” is a rhyming counting book by John Langstaff (illustrated by the incredible Feodor Rojankovsky) and was something that I sang with my kids so often it would pop up spontaneously while out on walks or off in the car together. But rhyming books are difficult to translate into other languages and so we decided to replace it with a scene referencing “Peter Pan” (and my ode to Mary Blair). With the same consideration, “The Owl and the Pussycat” changed to “Thumbelina” and gave me the chance to draw swooping swallows of which I can never get enough of.

The spread referencing “Thumbelina” in process.

Sophie, in sketches and final art.

As a child, I had heard all of these stories in different versions and expressions, especially as a result of growing up in the 80’s and watching animated pieces reimagining the original stories. I wanted to take my own impressions and turn them into dream worlds for Sophie to fall into (sometimes literally!). So while I based her adventures on stories stemming from classic literature, I focused mainly on elements that I felt made them magical to begin with. Flying on the back of a swallow over a twinkling field of flowers or chasing a talking white rabbit through a mystical forest certainly met that requirement for me! I also felt like, in the end, this is a story about Sophie and her love for books. It’s also very much about the universal challenge of the bedtime routine, which on this night for Sophie, runs particularly long!

One of my favorites scenes from the book. It’s nearly identical to the original rough I drew.

I lost track of how many penguins and re-drawings of spreads with penguins I made! Still, drawing penguins over and over isn’t such a bad thing - they’re such expressive birds.

The back cover, with some character elements peeking through.

This picture book feels like a love letter to my own childhood and a sweet nod to the books I remember fondly as a kid. As I note in the book’s dedication to my parents, they made sure we had lots of books around as reading and learning were part of everyday life. We had access to all kind of books - antique, falling apart encyclopedias, manuals on sailing and photography and quirky instruments, stories and fables surrounding the history of Panama (where I grew up), endless art instruction books, and plenty of odd and wonderful finds from garage sales. I have to credit my parents and those books for helping inform my own imagination!

Me & Sophie

If you got this far, thanks for reading all the way through! I hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes and learning more about “Sophie’s Stories”. I do hope you’ll pick up a copy for your own readers! You can find “Sophie’s Stories” at bookshops across the UK, as well as in France (though Sophie turned into Zoe!). You can also order online worldwide and here in the US.

And if there’s anything else you’d like to know about the process of creating a picture book, please comment below so we can try to answer your questions and solve those picture book mysteries.