Art Style

By the illustrator, Lisa Mertins

I mentioned the stylistic issues I had regarding how A Christmas Adventure wound up in connection to the art show and I’ll expand on that:

For a couple of years before Christmas Adventure, I was producing my illustrations by scanning my drawings and taking the images into a drawing program to create the line work.  Then I would transfer that image to photoshop to add color.  In other words, these were hybrid but ultimately computer generated images.

When it came time to frame the work for the gallery, I was at a loss.  I didn’t have anything to frame, the images only lived in my Mac as binary code!

So I entered the world of giclees – something I didn’t have any experience with.

Karen Raab of Chemers recommended someone to produce the images, those were beautifully framed for the show and everybody was thrilled.  But I vowed if I ever did another book, I’d create tangible, painted art.  Original art has more value and Chemer’s renowned, yearly show, Children’s Book Illustration show features some of the world’s best illustrators’ original pieces. I want to be able to have originals for Jimmy’s Adventure to rival those.