In Part Two, here’s Laura Wood’s great post about how she went about creating the visual world of Building Site Zoo. And  it includes samples of her roughs, storyboard, and work as it developed–thanks so much for sharing them with us, Laura!

Creating the illustrations for Building Site Zoo, by Laura Wood

The first time I read Sophie’s manuscript, I thought it was one of the most original picture books I was ever asked to illustrate.

I knew it would have been a fun text to bring to life but also quite challenging… which is always a good thing! I knew it would be hard for me to draw all those buildings and machines, since it’s not something I’m very used to!

Anyway, it didn’t take me long to decide to accept the challenge.

The first things publishers want to see are always the main characters of the story, so I started from there. The story doesn’t say explicitly who the characters are, which I personally love, since it gives me a lot of freedom to play around. I decided to go for brother, sister and grandpa.

After that, I started doing lot of research about cityscapes, buildings and machines before sketching ideas for the storyboard. I knew I needed to becoming familiar with the shapes of the machinery before getting the ideas out.

The idea I finally came out with was to approach the whole book, as a dual reality kind of thing: basically having two very similar spreads, the first one with the animal – the world made up by the kids – and the second one with the corresponding machine – the real world. This way, I thought the reader could make a connection easily between the text, the animals and the machinery in action. Mmm… I think written down sounds more complicated than it is, anyway here are some early storyboard sketches.

 

 

Some more storyboard sketches. As you can see, spreads developed and changed.

 

 

Once all the spreads have been approved by the publisher, I work on the final lines. For this book in particular, since there were a lot of overlapping elements on each spread, I preferred to draw some of the elements separately (background, animals, machines, characters, etc…) and put everything together in the computer.

I then proceed to colour everything. Once the internal spreads are coloured, the cover is always the last thing that gets done.

There were lots of different elements I wanted to fit in this particular cover, so I tried a few ideas but it took me quite a while to get the composition working…