Sophie’s Stories is out in the world and I’m very happy to share behind the scenes insights with you!

Sophie’s Stories started as a personal challenge to create a story I could work on while making final art for my debut book, “Found You”. Tapping into that energy made it easier to feel open to fresh ideas. I like to make time for “thinking walks” knowing at some point I’ll have story ideas. That’s exactly what happened with Sophie’s Stories.

I was at the top of a hill and admittedly I was thinking about my kids and some of the annoying things they do, but in endearing ways. Every night it was such a struggle to get them to go to sleep, because all they wanted to do was enjoy their books. And while I wanted them to get their needed sleep hours, I totally understood how hard it was to put the books down. I was the same as a kid and spent so much time reading and imagining and getting lost in narratives I’d create, intermingled with stories that were read to me. It was like I lived in the stories and they’d become part of my world.

And so with those thoughts (and the magic of the walk), the story of Sophie unfurled quickly in my mind, and I went home and wrote it down directly!

After revising the text, I separated the story into pages then started on the visuals. I tend to start with really messy scribbles, and then cheer myself on, eraser handy. Lately I’ve been using the iPad to do these first drawings, which after some adjustment, is pretty amazing.

I find speed and determination key when in the dummy book trenches. Once I have something down on paper I can revise and I’m past the initial wall of insecurity and confusion on what fits where in the story. For this dummy, I printed my rough sketches on A4 and folded them into a little book. From there I could read and flip through and add sticky notes with thoughts on what to fix. I went through a couple rounds of dummy book progress before late night sewing the binding of the final dummy book, then zipping it into my bag for a trip to the Bologna Book Fair the next day!

A big highlight of the fair for me was finally meeting my editor, Alison Green. We chatted a little about “Found You” and I showed her “Sophie’s Stories”. I was more than delighted when she said they would like to publish it! This meant the real work was about to get started ;)

You may not know it seeing the final spreads with everything pulled together so nicely, but getting there wasn’t easy! Especially early on, I worked through a lot of doubt and hesitancy while illustrating the book. When I look through my painted spreads, the early ones are much lighter, with color not extending as far as it should, or with an overall unfinished appearance. I was having to go back with digital tools to carry them through. And this was really frustrating! As the work continued, I was able to push through a lot of the fear that I was messing it all up and create some finished spreads that I was happy with. Usually this meant I had to make some very ugly pieces, and also many multiples of spreads, until I felt I had the look I was going for.

This is all just part of the process, but I think it’s important to share as it can feel really humbling when what you’re aiming for takes so long to reach (and maybe you never reach it, but come up with something totally different that’s actually a better fit!). I also had my wonderful art director, Zoë Tucker, pushing me along, with extraordinarily helpful insights and suggestions for how to solve those challenging parts.

From rough sketch to painted art (gouache/watercolor/color pencil), to digitally finished final art.

The finished spread with text…it’s always magical to see the finished art in the book, with the words, on gorgeous paper.

The story was originally based on 5 children’s books/stories/poems - “Over in the Meadow”, “The Thousand and One Nights”, “Alice in Wonderland”, “The Jungle Book”, and “The Owl and the Pussycat”. “Over in the Meadow” is a rhyming counting book by John Langstaff (illustrated by the incredible Feodor Rojankovsky) and was something that I sang with my kids so often it would pop up spontaneously while out on walks or off in the car together. But rhyming books are difficult to translate into other languages and so we decided to replace it with a scene referencing “Peter Pan” (and my ode to Mary Blair). With the same consideration, “The Owl and the Pussycat” changed to “Thumbelina” and gave me the chance to draw swooping swallows of which I can never get enough of.

Another view of my work flow for this project…first, a rough sketch in procreate, then a traditional/digital sketch, then a refined sketch with pencil, followed by painted art on paper, and lastly the final art finished in procreate and photoshop.

As a child, I had heard all of these stories in different versions and expressions, especially as a result of growing up in the 80’s and watching animated pieces reimagining the original stories. I wanted to take my own impressions and turn them into dream worlds for Sophie to fall into (sometimes literally!). So while I based her adventures on stories stemming from classic literature, I focused mainly on elements that I felt made them magical to begin with. Flying on the back of a swallow over a twinkling field of flowers or chasing a talking white rabbit through a mystical forest certainly met that requirement for me! I also felt like, in the end, this is a story about Sophie and her love for books. It’s also very much about the universal challenge of the bedtime routine, which on this night for Sophie, runs particularly long!

This picture book feels like a love letter to my own childhood and a sweet nod to the books I remember fondly as a kid. As I note in the book’s dedication to my parents, they made sure we had lots of books around as reading and learning were part of everyday life. We had access to all kind of books - antique, falling apart encyclopedias, manuals on sailing and photography and quirky instruments, stories and fables surrounding the history of Panama (where I grew up), endless art instruction books, and plenty of odd and wonderful finds from garage sales. I have to credit my parents and those books for helping inform my own imagination!

If you got this far, thanks for reading all the way through! I hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes and learning more about Sophie’s Stories. I do hope you’ll pick up a copy for your own readers! And if there’s anything else you’d like to know about the process of creating a picture book, please comment below so we can try to answer your questions and solve those picture book mysteries.