Peace, if this is your first time hearing or seeing “I Am Sausal Creek” let me present you the cover and some process shots from the creation of the book. Here is a link to purchase.
So me and author Melissa Reyes began work together on this book last year , but she has been working on the words for much longer which are beautiful, to the point, and poetic. And I would say they are equally matched by Cinthya Muñoz who translated the book.
Basically I start off every project (whether is on a book, for an organization, game company, whatever) with thumbnails. 1. Thumbnails: these are like quick jotted down ideas of what I see when I read text from the project or look at my notes. 2. Rough Sketches: Basically I ask my client or art director on the project to choose half or less of the thumbnails they liked, then I do a slightly larger sketch of those thumbnails. 3. Refined Sketches: Here, we decide on one image to express the idea/ story. This one image may need elements from the other sketches or revisions to refine it. Illustration tells a huge amount of the story with image.
Whether it is used in storytelling or character design, you see images that communicate the story/idea beyond the words, or you see that there are things missing that the project is trying to say. Sometimes, both. This is truly collaboration because the art must serve the story. And sometimes the story must change to fit the art. In this case, the text evolved very slightly, while the images went through changes until they were just right. 4. Color: Depending on the project, i include very rough color sketches to show where i will place color. The watercolor comes out quite different that my digital color though.
5. Final painting: This is what it looks like once its all done. All elements have been painted or drawn in. Take a look at some more sketches with the final paintings.
The final has a few edits as you can see.
If you are a student or first time working on a picture book, feel free to email me questions. I’ll try to answer them best I can. To get a copy of the book, please go to
