Stefanie Achenbach

I am working on my personal first book for children. I had the idea in the summer of 2024. Since October I am working on it. I drew 12 double pages. I never did a cover. Last year in October I decided that it is time to get going. I did one sketch.

As always I redid the sketch in Procreate. I wanted some night atmosphere with little lights. I did a similar illustration for the story.

As I wanted to draw this cover on A3 drawing paper I used a functional method to transfer the sketch to paper. Often I use my iPad as Lightbox. This time my lightbox was my window. I started coloring with Caron d’ache Luminance colored pencils. I colored without doing a color sketch.

As I resumed my work on it I had a big problem… The pencil, I used, was the dark blue Pilot Color Eno. After four months nothing was left of my sketch as the color of this pencil desolves with time. I had to redraw it. Today I finished it. As it was too big for my scanner, I had to devide it in two scans. Photoshop has the function Photomerge which was very helpful to combine both pictures. With some color tweaking here and there I am very proud to present the result! What do you think?