Behind The Scene of Good Characters Series

Working for Good Characters series was quite a challenge for me. The publisher, Kesaint Blanc, wanted a unique illustration style. I was still working with pastel pencils when they approached me in the mid of 2017, right after I came back to Indonesia from Italy, after attending Bologna Children's Book Fair ( I will write about my experience at BCBF later :) ).

I tried several illustration styles with diverse mediums, but painting and collaging impressed them the most. So, after some trials, I came up with collages of painted paper scraps to illustrate the manuscripts. I was contracted to work for 10 books of this series. It took one year to complete all the books.

More after the series was done and published in 2019, I am more confident to continue improving the style. I worked manually with the collages. I painted some papers, most of them are leftover paper scraps, I cut them manually with scissor and build the scenes with glue.

I started the process with making sketches and layout for every pages. I sketched and arranged the text in Photoshop and sent them to the editor for approval. After approval, the fun process began! Painting the based background colors for the artwork, preparing the papers for making scenes, cutting them into shapes, arranging them based on the sketches I made previously. I really enjoy cutting and sticking the papers, trust me, it's addictive! My favorite scenes were the garden scenes and beehive in Hardworking Bee! Arranging the beehive was kind of therapeautic. Hahaha!

The next step was scanning. My scanner is in A4 size, well that's a poblem when I have to scan larger papers like the actual artwork size for this series. I made them all in A3 size, so I had to scan them partially, and combined the parts in Photoshop. I made color adjustment too here, because sometimes the scanner could not capture the real colors perfectly.

Here are some illustrations from the series:

And here are the Good Characters series: