Just coming out of our first literature brief with Nosy Crow that focussed on character illustration (you can see the illustrations and read more about that one here), we jumped into our second literature brief, this time focussing on children's non-fiction.
Literature brief's with Pathways Into Children's Publishing are culminations of the sessions and workshops we do weekly and are set for mentees by publishers to reflect what it would be like to work with them on a live project as a commissioned illustrator.
After such an incredible experience working with the team at Nosy Crow, I couldn't wait to see who we'd be working with next and was beyond excited to hear that it would be Bloomsbury Publishing!
We met with Katie Hutton, Art Director and Emily Ball, Senior Commissioning Editor as well as the rest of the children's non-fiction team via Zoom who gave us a really detailed, clear breakdown of what they would like from us for our sequential narrative non-fiction brief.
We were then sent the text from three spreads of 'Jumbo: The Most Famous Elephant who Ever Lived' written by Alexandra Stewart.
The brief was to illustrate these three spreads, the first being an introduction to Jumbo and the Jardin des Plantes, the second a facts page showing the differences between African and Asian elephants and the third, the continuation of Jumbo's story.
I started by sketching out some very rough scribbles and ideas, then went on to creating some rough illustrations for the spreads, ready for our first round of submissions.
After submission, we had a feedback session via Zoom before moving on to edits and our final submission of the colour spreads. I had fantastic, really helpful feedback from Celine Culliford, the Editor of Illustrated Publishing, Katie Hutton, Art Director and Lara Hancock, Head of Illustrated Publishing.
Then I moved on to editing the roughs and developing the spreads following the feedback.
Following the updates to the rough spreads I moved on to developing a colour palette and creating the finished artwork for the final submission.
I really enjoyed working on this brief, I had never thought too much about illustrating children's non-fiction, focussing more on picture books, but the brilliant experience I had working with the team at Bloomsbury really opened the world of non-fiction up for me.
Looking forward to literature brief 3!
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