My characters become my friends and I feel sad when the work is over. When I am working on a new story I spend many hours drawing and painting.
Sending the book in at the sketching stage saves time if there is something I need to change before I start painting. I consider myself part of a team when working on a book, and I want to make sure I have the same vision for the project as the author, editor and art director. Sometimes I have 10 sketches of the same page before I am pleased with the work.Īfter drawing each page in the story, I make a black & white book dummy that I send to the art director. I like the transparency of the tracing paper and how easy the pencil slides on the surface. I like to work on tracing paper and make a rough sketch of my idea using several pieces of tracing paper to get it just the way I want. I make sketches of the animal until I can draw them without looking at the reference pictures. The cat is my own cat, Delilah, who isn’t always the best model. In this illustration I used my daughter for the pose, but changed her into a little boy. I use the pictures only as a guide and often I change the person in the picture totally. I also take a lot of pictures of my friends and family to help me get the right perspective or movement in the illustration that I want. I like to take my own pictures of animals whenever I can, but sometimes I have to use books or internet for my images. I think about the most important part of the story to illustrate, the design of each page and where to place the text.Īfter my rough story board I start gathering reference. I draw a very rough layout of each page of the story. I always start by brainstorming my ideas for the book on a story board. Her most recent books are Ocean waves & Other Tales and Play dates & Other Tales, by Helen H. She has illustrated When I lived with Bats and Playing with Dolphins, both written by Faith McNulty. Since then Lena has illustrated My First Book of Words, and numerous Hello Readers for Scholastic Inc., including the book Dancing with Manatees, that has sold over half a million copies. Her first book was Keeping a Christmas Secret written by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. When I was seven, I was given a book of Hans Christian Andersen’s Fairy Tales, and would spend hours creating my own pictures to the stories I read.” I can not remember when I didn’t draw or paint. “I grew up reading the wonderful books about Pippi Longstocking, The Children of Noisy Village and many other books by Swedish author Astrid Lindgren.
Illustrator Lena Shiffman was born and raised in Sweden, a country rich in story-telling.
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