Illustration can bring a book to life, lightening the tone and adding personality. Though illustration styles may vary, the process remains pretty much the same. Let’s look at the illustration process for a recent project with Hannaford.

book illustration, book production, corporate storytelling

Investing time now to save time (and money) later

Before investing hours into illustration, we have a bit of back and forth with the client. We scan the manuscript, the image plan and archives and put together an illustration plan. For Hannaford, the illustrations were to appear on the chapter openers, so it was important that they related to the content in the chapter. Once the client has approved the plan, we can start developing the illustration style.

Repurposing a style

Hannaford sent us several drawings of vehicles when we started working together, and we referenced these for the new illustrations. Using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator, I traced the original images.

At this stage, I’m unpacking the style; the weight of the linework, the types of patterns used for shadowing, the level of detail and the balance of clean vs wiggly lines. This small sample is referenced constantly throughout the process and helps maintain consistency from illustration to illustration.

Now for the fun part

The next step is essentially tracing. There are a few techniques to help with this process.

1. Take the photo into Photoshop and convert it to a high contrast black and white image. This removes a lot of the minute detail and highlights shadow areas. It is impossible to include every detail of these Hannaford trucks in this simplified style, so blocking in key shapes is key to mastering scale and perspective.

2. Print out the photo and trace it by hand using tracing paper. This technique is a great way of homing in on key details. After hand tracing, the image can be brought into Illustrator to clean up or retrace.

3. Tracing directly from the photo in Illustrator works too! I find lowering the opacity of the image and using a contrasting stroke colour makes it easier to see what you’re doing.

A combination of all three techniques was used for the Hannaford trucks. For the linework, I used the pen tool; sometimes adding anchor points to make straight lines, other times free-handing it so that it matched the hand-drawn look from the reference imagery. Drawing it in Illustrator as a vector image ensures that it can be easily edited down the track, if necessary – a good safety .

Vector Images

Vector images are like connect-the-dots: points create shapes that can be easily resized without losing quality. Unlike raster images – made of tiny ink dots that blur when stretched – vectors stay sharp at any size. For simple illustrations like the Hannaford ones, vectors are the way to go.

Make it your own

It’s a time-consuming process, but the results are worth it. In the same way we treasure photos, personalised illustrations unique to a brand add value to a book’s design. That being said, I am accepting no more illustration projects until I have invested in an ergonomic mouse –  the hand cramps are real!

– Jane Heriot, Junior Graphic Designer