40. Drawing Lil' Scuba Divers! 🤿

We Are Jellyfish: Picture Book Process

This is the 40th update on my book-making process for my next book, We Are Jellyfish—a picture book about those weird, blubbery creatures of the deep.

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Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you’re enjoying some good pies, biscuits, family time, and… naps!

Last week and this week I finally finished drawing all the scuba divers for the book—it took me much longer than I thought it would! But, they turned out really well, so at least I’m happy with them. :)

Here are some process shots of how I made them plus the updated storyboard and a list of what all I need to do to finish this book at the end!

First, here are the original sketches that I had been using as placeholders on the final art spreads:

I had taken two of the scuba divers (the dark ones below) to a little bit more final to test out some things, but had not spent much time getting them right. Then at some point I redrew them and changed the colors to the bright, neon green/blue palette (in top-right corner). So now, I needed to experiment more with colors, finalize the linework/style/positions, and find what works best!

I came up with those four color palettes above and liked all of them. So I decided to test them out on some final art spreads—both a white and a dark background. You can see the tests on the dark background below. After I did the tests I realized even though I liked the dark hair, it didn’t work on the dark background. And I also liked the red scuba outfit and thought it would be a good contrast to the mostly blue/green backgrounds in the book, but it ended up looking too different, like it didn’t belong. So it turned out my second instinct of the neon green was the best color palette!

From there, I grabbed all the scuba diver sketches I had used as placeholders in the final art spreads and put them in order of appearance. I ended up switching/changing some of the positions so that there was variety from spread to spread and not too-similar positions right next to each other.

Then I went through and drew all the final linework! This is the part that took way longer than I thought it would. I realized as I was drawing that much of the sketches were a little off—like weird legs or arms, or flippers pointed in odd directions, or proportions being imbalanced. Plus figuring out all the facial expressions and how the head should be turned. There was a lot of fiddling and redrawing, but I think they turned out really well!

Here is a close up of when I started coloring them in Photoshop, with my little color palette guide I made for each eye-dropper-ing.

And… tada! Here are all the final scuba divers!

Here’s one of the final art spreads with the new scuba diver girls so you can see how they work together!

And here’s the updated storyboard with all the new scuba divers! I also have adjusted some colors and details in some of the spreads, especially the first five.

This email is already very long from all the images, but I quickly want to jot out (mainly for myself) a list of the tasks I still need to do to finish this book!

• Draw the speech bubbles and finalize the text in them (shortening!)

• Go through every spread to finalize the artwork and clean things up

• Finalize typography and make sure it is consistent throughout

• Write and design the Glossary page and any other back matter

• Design the book cover (front and back!)

• Write any publishing copy (like book description

• Upload everything to Amazon and send out a Substack post to announce!

Seeing all that together… it’s a lot. But many of those tasks are fairly simple or are already partially done. To have this book available to buy in time for Christmas, I probably have about a week and a half to get everything done and uploaded.

Is it possible? I don’t know! Am I going to try? I guess so!

Perhaps my very favorite part of the book.

Worst case, I get the book out in January. It’s been helpful to have a deadline to push me through the end of this book that has been in the works for almost 3 years now!

I’ll try to send out a short update next week, but will be mostly focused on writing, editing, and designing to finish as much as I can! :)

<3,
Christine