My 8,000-Mile Journey to Illustrate a Children's Book!
My boyfriend and I were taking a holiday on the southeast coast of New South Wales when I received the email offering the opportunity to illustrate Hop, Vroom, Skitter. We had spent a lovely few days soaking up the Australian summer sun on the beach and dipping ourselves in the crystal clear water. On our final day, I got the news and had to wait, excitedly, while we drove three-hours home to Canberra before I could tell my family: I was going to be illustrating a children’s book!
Illustrating a book from all the way across the world – thousands of miles away from its American author – had its own little challenges, the first being organizing meetings across time zones. One day, I was ready an hour early due to a mix-up I had made in converting the meeting time. (But luckily, not an hour late!)
I got the hang of it easily enough and got to meet the author, Debi Novotny, as well as Lara and Carrie, the co-owners of Lawley Publishing, over Zoom, and the ball got rolling quickly from there.
At first, I only had the title, Hop, Vroom, Skitter, and spent my time before I got the manuscript trying to decode what the book was about. Was it about cars? I had hoped not; I’m not very good at drawing cars, and besides, cars don’t hop. When I found out our cast of characters included a tortoise, packrat, hummingbird, and jackrabbit, I was incredibly excited! Not cars at all, but cute animals! Phew.
The first step was character design. We do have hummingbirds here in Australia, but no tortoises in my area on the east side. We have lots of mouse-like marsupials like bilbies, bettongs, and potoroos, but no packrats. And whilst I have spotted the occasional hare out on bush walks, they’re pests here (and very elusive). So, it was time for me to be introduced to and draw a lot of these animals for the first time!
Here is an illustration of an Australian bilby I did for Easter! Here in Australia, some of us opt for an Easter bilby over a bunny since bilbies are native animals and rabbits are pests.
The same went for the location that Hop, Vroom, Skitter is set in: the Arizona desert. Where I live in Australia, we’re surrounded by gum trees and bush, with lots of tall, dry grass but no desert. So, it was time to learn about a whole new range of plant life as well! We do have beautiful red dirt in common, but that was about it, so Debi was a huge help, sending me lots of photos of different cacti, flowers, and parts of the landscape alongside its animal inhabitants.
These are the initial character sketches for Hop Vroom Skitter.
The character design phase was a great learning experience for me, not only learning what these animals were but learning how to draw them, making sure they were cute and stylized and still very recognizable (especially for the readers in Arizona who would be much more familiar with them). For example, at first, I had made the jackrabbit character too “bunny-like” by making him too small and round with a little button nose.
Not knowing my Arizona animals, I had made the jackrabbit smaller than the tortoise as if the tortoise was one of the giant ones from the Galapagos and the jackrabbit were a baby bunny! So, I learned the actual size difference between the two and made the jackrabbit a hare with longer, larger ears and longer legs. And voila! We had our main characters alongside the packrat and hummingbird, who I had figured out pretty easily.
The next step was to actually illustrate the book! As an illustrator, I get all the words set out on pages as if it’s a picture book – but with no pictures! After learning all about the flora and fauna of the Arizona desert, it was time to put all my knowledge together visually and help tell the story that Debi had written.
It was now headed into the middle of the year, which is Winter in the Southern Hemisphere (including Australia), so I spent a lot of the time illustrating from under a bundle of blankets and purring cats (or supervisors, as I like to call them). First came the sketches, which are rough, uncolored drawings of my idea of what could be happening on each page. Little changes were made as Debi and I discussed the illustrations back and forth through email. Once everything was approved, I outlined the sketches and coloured it all in like my own personal colouring book!
A desert, at least in my mind before illustrating, didn’t have a whole lot of colour. The sand/dirt may be bright, but what else could there be? I quickly and happily learned how wrong I was. When you look closer, deserts are full of all sorts of beautiful pops of colours perfect for a picture book. Pops of pink and yellow can be found in flowers, greens in cacti, and purples in the rock as the sun goes down over the landscape. All of which I was sure to include in the book.
Those details made me aware of a lot about the landscape here at home as well. Suddenly, I noticed more of the colourful wildflowers that popped up in the grass and the huge array of colourful birds that stood out against the greyish green of the gum tree leaves. If you’ve never seen any Australian birds before, my personal favourites would be the Rainbow Lorikeet and the Eastern Rosella – I highly recommend a quick google!
The character design phase was a great learning experience for me, not only learning what these animals were but learning how to draw them, making sure they were cute and stylized and still very recognizable (especially for the readers in Arizona who would be much more familiar with them). For example, at first, I had made the jackrabbit character too “bunny-like” by making him too small and round with a little button nose.
Not knowing my Arizona animals, I had made the jackrabbit smaller than the tortoise as if the tortoise was one of the giant ones from the Galapagos and the jackrabbit were a baby bunny! So, I learned the actual size difference between the two and made the jackrabbit a hare with longer, larger ears and longer legs. And voila! We had our main characters alongside the packrat and hummingbird, who I had figured out pretty easily.
The online nature of publishing these days also means that more authors and illustrators, such as myself, are given more opportunities that we may not have been able to get simply through word of mouth alone.
I’m so thankful for the opportunity to illustrate Hop, Vroom, Skitter and collaborate with others across the world! Every day I worked on this beautiful book, it felt like I was travelling back and forth. I’d be drawing the Arizona desert during the day with all of its prickly cacti, following the tortoise on his adventures with his Arizonan friends. And in the evenings, I would walk the dusty red trails through the local bush, watching the kangaroos hop through the tall grass.
Jess Rose is the illustrator of Hop, Vroom, Skitter.
Jess, you are so talented and I love working with you. I’m so happy we had the wonderful opportunity to create this book together!