From Jim's storyboard, I was able to create my preliminary sketches. We sat down together and made our changes.
By the Illustrator, Lisa Mertins
Ann Cameron is Associate to the President. She’s the person I do lots of my correspondence with when Jim is tied up with his day job. Along with the manuscript, she emailed an additional file that had great pictures of Jim and his friends and family when he was a boy. I would be able to draw his mom and dad and some of the children in the book using these as reference.
Jim Doti, fourth from left at his birthday party with friends. I used this photo to illustrate the children in the story.
However, best of all, the manuscript included some illustrated gems by Jim that he added to help me see how he imagined the illustrations.
Usually people who don’t draw preface any drawing they do with an admission that they “can’t draw a straight line” or that they are only able to draw stick figures, however, I was delighted when I saw how Jim visualized the story. Since, for the most part, I think visually, Jim’s visual aids took some of the story-boarding burden off of me. What a big help these were.
My job in response to his initial email was to draw my own storyboard version, taking into account his drawings and notes.
I made very rough sketches of the pages and presented them to Jim. We went through them and he added his thoughts. If I needed to add Blackie in a scene for example, or if we decided an image worked better if it were flopped.
Jim's sketch for page 23 lead to my initial sketch below. On the right is my final sketch before I went to final art.
If this book were published by a mainstream publishing house, these corrections and additions would be noted by an editor. That’s easy enough to do now via the internet, but I can remember how torturous it was working with an east coast publisher in the late twentieth century (early 90s) when we had to rely on phone calls and the postal service. Why, back in my day… (hahaha, kidding). Although I live and work about 65 miles from Orange, what a breeze it was to pop over to Jim’s office for some M&Ms and a Chapman water while we went over the sketches!
After going over the sketches to make sure they match the story details and that the tone is right, I made corrections and we emailed back and forth to iron out all the visual details before I proceeded to final sketches.
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