pbjunkies: I Love You All year Round celebration! day 1

This is day one of the celebration and as promised, every day of this week, I will be sharing a little about the process of illustrating this book. If you have any questions regarding the making of "I love you all year round", please leave them on a comment and I'd be happy to answer them.

When I first read the manuscript, I fell in love with it. It is beautiful and loving, so I knew I wanted to convey that feeling of warmth through out the book. I almost immediately started having images and ideas in my head as to what characters I wanted to work with, I knew I wanted them to be animals. I began sketching, sketching and more sketching..

This process of sketching and thinking does take a while. I wanted to make sure the characters were appealing, sweet and unique. I tried with different kinds of animal characters and sent them to Piggy Toes Press for revisions until we were all happy with the mice family formed by dad, mom and child :o)

Once I had the characters down on paper it was so much easier to "move" them around in my imagination and make them come to life onto different backgrounds and settings.

... to be continued tomorrow

Now take a look at our beautiful first entries

and don't forget to click on the artist name to visit their site.

Thanks Kristi, Lisa and Virginia!