A Thank You Letter to My Teacher

behind the scenes of illustrating a picture book cover

I am happy to announce the release of a book I illustrated called, “A Thank You Letter to My Teacher,” written by Deb Adamson, published by Sourcebooks Kids. It’s so exciting to have this sweet book out in the world for teachers and students to enjoy together!

To celebrate, I’ll be hosting a book launch event this month at The Getalong in Nashville. We’ll be doing a story time, a book signing, and a fun activity for the kids.

I’m especially excited to have this event at The Getalong because they’ve been part of my creative career from the very beginning. The owner, Jen, was one of the first people to take a chance on me while I was still a student six years ago. She hired me to paint a mural in their shop and since then, she has continued to support my work. Their beautiful shop is full of super sweet and very thoughtfully curated products, perfect for families and children.

Illustrating the Cover

Today, I’ll be walking you through the process of illustrating the cover for this book.We started with four initial cover sketch options, based on direction given from the team at Sourcebooks.

From there, we narrowed it down to the three strongest concepts which I then developed into color roughs to help give a clearer sense of the final palette for the book and overall vision.

The team chose option 3 and I moved onto creating the final artwork!

For the overall style of the book, I really wanted to incorporate an analog feel while utilizing digital tools (working digitally typically helps me stay on schedule.) I started painting the cover with watercolors to create the tree border, foliage and school building.

Once the base colors and textures were in place, I illustrated on top of the scanned painting digitally in Procreate. I added details and refined the environment and lastly, added in the children and the warm cream background.

Finally, I collaborated with the designers at Sourcebooks to add the typography and finalize the cover layout, bringing together the finished piece you see on the shelves!

This project was such a joy to work on, and I’m so grateful to have been a part of it. If you’re local to Nashville, I’d love to see you at the launch event soon. As always, thanks for being here and following along with my work!