When I first started looking at the portfolios of professional illustrators, I had an illustration style in mind for Scavenger Scout. I wanted a watercolor look, with a strong, modern color palette. 250 portfolios later, I had fallen in love with no less than 15 different illustrators. All of their styles were unique and appealing. It took me a month to finally narrow it down to Yana Popova of YaPpy Arts. The process was a lot like buying a house. Your realtor will tell you that you’ll just know when you’ve found the right one. The same apparently holds true of working with artists. As soon as I saw Yana’s work, I just knew she was the right artist to bring Scout to life.
Originally I wanted a traditional watercolor artist, but I have since learned that skilled digital illustrators can recreate the look of watercolor and other painting styles with the added bonus of being able to make changes to images on the fly. With all of the edits we have gone through for Scout’s illustrations, I can’t imagine an illustrator having to redo entire illustrations to change one section.
The digital illustration process is very labor intensive and I was interested to see how it works so Yana was kind enough to record her creating some jeweled goblets for one of the illustrations. It’s a lot of fun to watch the goblets appear and then become more detailed.