I illustrated Dactyl Hill Squad 3: Thunder Run, written by Daniel José Older. The project included a full-color cover, three black and white single-page interior illustrations, and a black and white map. Continue scrolling to see the development process for the interior illustrations.
Publisher: Scholastic
Designer: Christopher Stengel
Tools:Adobe Photoshop
Scholastic provided me the manuscript to read and the designer and I discussed ideas for the interior illustrations at length. The author, Daniel, and the editor were not extensively involved in this process but were on hand to answer questions and offer feedback at key points. The bulk of communication around the illustration process was between me and the designer.
As usual, I finished the chapter header illustration pretty quickly. We just needed a new dactyl image. I added mesas to reflect the third book's western setting.
We decided to use my alternate chapter cover layout for the first of the book's three chapter openers, so all that was left was settling on the layout for the other two openers. We discussed scene options, with the designer communicating with the author and editor and then relaying their thoughts to me. Once we picked two scenes from the book to use, I whipped up some thumbnails.
Once the team selected which layouts to move forward with, I did up tighter sketches.
The first opener didn't change too much from the layout I sketched for the cover. Since I didn't need to make room for book title, I raised the giant frogs to fill the center of the composition and pushed the composition to a low-angle up shot to show off their massive scale.
I was a little confused about the second opener. The scene was a coffee stand. I drew a literal stand. The designer showed the author and the author replied that the coffee stand was a dinosaur. What?? I was still confused, so the author drew a sketch to help me out! That got us all on the same page. I did a new sketch, which the author loved and we took it to final.
There weren't many notes on the third opener illustration and the sketch was pretty tight, so I moved straight into the final version. Here is the inked version and the final version with halftone-style rendering.
For the map we were using the Louisiana map from book 2 for the left page, so my only responsibility for book three was to draw a single-page map of the New Orleans French Quarter. I searched for as many old maps of the French Quarter as I could find, as well as newer maps, and got feedback from the team on what landmarks to include.
Here is the final spread that appears in the book.
Finished? Click here to see the book's cover illustration or return to the illustration page.