Ranger in Time: Hurricane Katrina interiors

On Tuesday I talked about the process behind illustrating the cover of Ranger in Time: Hurricane Katrina Rescue, written by Kate Messner and published by Scholastic. The book also contains 15 black-and-white illustrations by me, and today I'm going to talk about how I created those scenes.

If you're a regular reader of my blog, then you probably know what's coming. Silly poses, in messy apartments, wearing llama print pajamas.

Let's get to it then!

For Hurricane Katrina Rescue, I had to draw all sorts of interesting situations and unusual poses. In this picture, the main character Claire is wading through her rapidly flooding house. Here is the initial sketch.

Aaaaaand here's the llama print pajamas.

Closeup:

Unfortunately the llama print pajamas fell apart not long after this, so I guess I'll have to find some new ones. Do you think I could write them off as a buisness expense?

And here's the final illustration:

In the next illustration, Claire's house has flooded up to the attic, and Claire is trying to hack through the roof with an axe. I'm not the sort of person who keeps an axe around, but luckily for me, my Dad had a real axe in his tool shed.

I think this was the first time I'd ever attempted to lift an axe in my life. As you can see I performed magnificently.

Here's the sketch:

And here's the final:

For this last one, I'm going to show you a sketch that I had to completely re-do because, well, it wasn't very good. Normally I don't talk about this stuff (you know, my FAILURES) on the blog, because if any potential clients are reading then I want them to think that I always deliver perfect work every time. But, as far as I can tell, a lot more aspiring artists read this blog than potential clients, and I want to show you guys that everyone kind of messes up sometimes, and it's not the end of the world. Good clients will stick with you through the process.

In this scene, I had to draw Claire on the roof of her house. She sees a life jacket float by, but it's covered in snakes, so she grabs an oar in order to knock the snakes off of the vest. Here are some of the reference photos I took.

And here's the sketch I made:

The art director and author pointed out that it would be impossible to kneel on a sloped roof in this manner, and also Claire's face looked strange. This scene needed a redo, and I needed more accurate reference photos.

I wasn't going to actually pose on a roof, so I made a sloped surface by placing a board on top of some stairs. This made for more authentic poses.

Here's the new sketch:

And here's the final:

I hope you enjoyed this sneak peek into the making of Ranger in Time: Hurricane Katrina Rescue. That's all the time I have tonight. As always, thanks for reading my blog!