Snow ghost, written by Tony Mitton and published by Bloomsbury, is now out on the book shelves and online, so to celebrate I thought you’d like to see some of the process!

You may or may not know that a picture book can take a long time to create; working out the characters; each individual spread; making sure the balance of imagery is right throughout. I’m going to share some of the various stages of the first double-page spread of Snow Ghost, just to give you an idea of how involved it can be.

The first roughs I drew were very small, thumbnail scribbles of a simple layout. I worked out where the main image elements would go, and where I wanted to place the text.

I then drew the roughs at the size of the actual book, refining and redrawing numerous times. I drew quite tight roughs so that I had everything in it’s place and so that I had the composition as I wished. I used reference during this time to get the imagery feeling believable. At this stage, the Snow Ghost character was going to be quite an abstract non-human being, floating across the sky.

Before moving onto the rest of the book, I started exploring the process I would use for the artwork, so created these two initial paintings using acrylic washes, pencils colours, graphite and collage. But I found I was creating pieces that felt too tight and refined, and there wasn’t enough life in the scenes.

After much discussion and some time later, we decided to take a different approach and the Snow Ghost character evolved in a more anthropomorphic way.

Reworked roughs and a slightly different layout, led to these following drawings…

…and from this, looser and more expressive sketch followed the final painted artwork. Here are a few details of the artwork in progress.

Many layers of paint, pencil mark-making, pastel and collage were used to create the image…

…which was then scanned in to have a little extra digital magic added in Photoshop, before the text was laid over the image by the designer.

And there it is - the first of many spreads making up the Snow Ghost book!

(You can purchase a copy of Snow Ghost, written by Tony Mitton, published by Bloomsbury, in my online Book Shop in the Menu above).