Book Dummy - take 2

I posted a different color version of this a couple weeks ago, but since then I decided to experiment with the background color to make the penguins stand out more and also added the white sketchy background.

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty & Illustration Friday

Chicken Nugget Lemon Tooty is a super fun blog where children's book illustrator Aaron Zenz posts artwork by his talented kids. For the blog's three year anniversary, Aaron wanted to do something special for the kids, so he invited anyone to recreate one of the kids' drawings in their own style. I thought Isaac's drawing of a hippo hanging in a bat cave was simply genius, so that's the one I chose to wrap in my own style and paint tonight.

by Isaac, age 10

Color Spread

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Here's the color version of a spread from my picture book dummy that I promised you in my last post. When I submit my sketch dummy of my own picture book manuscript to publishers, I'll also send along a couple full-color spreads so that they can see what the finished art would look like. Actually, I'll be submitting to agents first who handle picture book author/illustrators. I've never submitted my work to agents before, so I'm starting to gather info for a dream agent list.

My Picture Book Dummy

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The penguins were too impatient to wait for food - they found their own.

I'm working on my picture book dummy right now, and it's so much fun! I plan on painting this sketch soon, so check back for the color version. If you write a picture book manuscript, you submit just the manuscript without illustrations to publishers to see if they will acquire it. But since I want to do both the writing and illustrating, I draw sketches for my whole picture book manuscript that I've written and submit those sketches along with the text as a small mock-up of my picture book called a dummy or sketch dummy.