The making of...

Behind the scenes of my first book. A week long celebration!

Can you believe it’s only seven more sleeps until the big day!? As you probably already know by now if you’ve followed me for a while, it’s an extra special one for me this year, as my first book has been published! The Night Before Christmas, written by Clement C. Moore, illustrated by me and published by the wonderful Folio Society. 

To celebrate this milestone, I am going make daily posts all week about the creation of the book. Today I am posting my first sketches of Santa. 

As you can imagine, it was pretty intimidating to create my own version of him. He’s been drawn so many times by many wonderful artists. So, as I began work I thought back to the last module on the MA¹ when the wonderful Katherina Manolessou (our tutor on the module) encouraged us just to make images without worrying about story or any of the details you tend to worry about at the beginning of a project. I found it hugely freeing and it helped me let go, play around and just make a start without overthinking things. 

these are some of the sketches I made for my Masters Stage project, and they felt like a big breakthrough for me, as I was still afraid of drawing from my imagination!

So when I began working on The Night Before Christmas, rather than storyboarding, I decided to try a little exercise where I took Santa through a drawn sequence. When I was first thinking about how I might illustrate the book, I thought I might do a parallel visual story to what the text is saying.

I always love books when the images tell their own story, and don’t just illustrate exactly what the text is saying. So I drew out a sequence where you see Santa as he wakes up, gets dressed, eats breakfast, etc… It was really fun imagining him sleepily unbuttoning his PJs, munching on some toast as he wakes up! I thought you could show that sequence as the text is talking about the family going to sleep. Although I enjoyed the exercise, in the end, I decided that it wasn’t going to work. But it turned out to be a great way for me to get to know Santa a bit, and let go of my worries about whether I could create a character that felt like my own version. He started off a bit more quirky and got a bit softer by the end.

some of my Santa sketches

Doing this exercise helped me relax and not worry too much about the end result, and it made it much easier to get going. I have the most self-doubt about drawing from my imagination, and I often feel that it’s going to be too difficult. There’s a feeling of conjuring up something from nothing that I find especially intimidating - and so it always feels like a bit of a surprise when the images show up on the page. I remember feeling huge relief when I did these - ok, phew, I think I’ll be able to find my own Santa! It felt like it broke the seal on the book.

some misecellaneous sketches from the early days

Tomorrow, and for the rest of the week, until Sunday - the night before Christmas (!) - I’ll be writing a daily post about some of the process behind the book. Is there anything you’re especially curious about? Ask me in the comments below. I’m wondering if I should make one of these posts a Q&A. Send me any questions you have about how I made the book to my email address ellabeechbooks@gmail.com with the subject line “Q&A” or put them in the comments below. Perhaps it could be live, if I can figure out a good time, or if not, I can record a video with answers to the questions you send.

More tomorrow!

Ella xx

1. in Children’s Book Illustration at The Cambridge School of Art.