Brainstorming requires your butt in the chair and your fingers on the keyboard with a sketchpad on the desk in front of you - at least if you’re me.)īecause, as I frequently did during my commercial career, I planned the series to run long - in this case, seven books - and because I have to finish the series now with Book 3, I find myself once again rethinking where I wanted to go with the story, and digging through the core principles of what I’d already built, and how these worked. (Reading and noting is done with the books and sticky notes. Through the cockpit glass, we see the captain gritting his teeth.' There are many more examples, but in every case, it's an impossible panel that leads to one irritated artist.īut that's the challenge, and in this case, the ship had to be reduced.Today is my first day of actual story brainstorming (a combination of plotting, doodling, and talking to myself) on The Emerald Sun. I first ran into this trouble when I started in comic books, with writers describing impossible panels: 'A massive star-destroyer is hurtling through space, weaving through meteors. This is a common dilemma in illustration it is very easy to imagine characters riding a giant beast, or in the window of a huge castle, but when artists are asked to draw such a scene while capturing both the human-sized characters (even their smiling faces) along with the gigantic elements, it is often an impossible task.

After a lot of discussion with the editor and several more passes at the layout, I had to adjust the scale of the ship quite a bit, reducing its size relative to the characters in order to make them more visible. Although the author's original notes had the ship substantially larger, it was decided that my initial layouts left the characters too small. Perhaps the biggest challenge of this cover was settling on the size of the ship. I designed the dragon/bird ship based on notes and sketches from the author, although I kind of went off on my own a bit with the flourishes in the armor.

The line art was drawn in ink and colored in Painter and Photoshop. This is the wraparound cover for 'The Silver Door', the forthcoming sequel to 'The Ruby Key' from Holly Lisle's 'Moon and Sun' series of fantasy novels from Scholastic.

The silver door by holly lisle