Interview with me, about the Jesus Storybook Bible

Sarah Short from the Short Stop blog, asked to interview me last week to accompany an interview with the Jesus Storybook Bible author, Sally Lloyd-Jones.

Here's an extract, to read the rest go here.

How long did it take you to complete the illustrations in The Jesus Storybook Bible?

In total I worked on the illustrations for around 10 months pretty much full time, although I did also manage to fit in buying my first house, moving house and having a baby (with some help from my lovely wife)... There are 180 illustrations in the book and I had to produce rough drawings for each of them before moving on to the final coloured artwork. I work digitally so each of the drawings was drawn initially in pencil, then again in ink and then scanned in to my Mac. I then created the colours and textures in Photoshop. The whole book fills up about 75Gb of space (150 CD's or 16 DVD's!) and I had to keep several backups while I was working on it so that I wouldn't lose it if something catastrophic happened to my computer. Once the artwork was finished, Sally and the publishers had to approve it and suggest any changes that needed to be made.

How did you come up with the vision for the illustrations? How would you describe the style of these illustrations?

I'm often asked this and the answer is very simple, but often suprising to some people: the text. This is where the inspiration always comes from first, I simply read the page and see what pops in to my head. Then I draw it and see if what I've drawn would look better viewed from further away or closer up, or from above (like the city of Jericho in the book), or from down low (like the spread with Goliath). That's it in a nutshell, the really tricky bit is getting the pictures on the paper (or screen) to look like the pictures in my head!