When I first started writing the Famlaer series, I knew it would be about faeries because I have been obsessed with them forever. My biggest influence was a book by Brian Froud and Alan Lee. I didn’t start by sitting at a keyboard and typing it out. I began with drawing. For the first book, it took six years to draw out the characters and scenes because I didn’t quite know where the story was going, but once I finished the drawings, the book started to take shape. The first book, Famlaer – The Real Faeryland, has the most illustrations.
Once the drawings were drawn and shaded using pencils, they were scanned into the computer. They were then opened in Photoshop, and colour was added along with a few embellishments using filters and brushes. This has been the process for each of the books, including Famlaer 2 – A New Home in an Old Land and Famlaer 3 – A Different World. I am starting on the drawings for the fourth and last book in the series.
In this post, I have put together a few of my illustrations from Famlaer 3 – A Different World, showing how they began and what the final images looked like before adding them to the book. Every image in each book is hand-drawn, and once I’m satisfied with the drawing, it is shaded with pencils of several grades, from HB to B10 to H4, depending on how deep the shading is needed and smudged using blending stumps, also known as tortillons. As stated above, each drawing is scanned and saved on the computer and coloured in Photoshop using different paint brushes and filters.
Here are three images from Famlaer 3 – A Different World. If you have read any of the books, let me know if you would like to see any of the other illustrations, from drawings to coloured images.
All three books are available on Amazon in print or e-book.
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