Hi friends! I’m Veronica Miller Jamison, illustrator of three picture books, one middle grade novel, and an adult fashion memoir. My first author-illustrator title, The Stories In You: Inspired by the Wisdom of Toni Morrison, will be published later this year by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers (yay!). I’m excited to be this month’s guest blogger for the SCBWI Blog.
Picture books, as we know, are a fantastic medium where words and images work in a beautifully symbiotic fashion. As an illustrator, I create my favorite work when the text of a manuscript immediately inspire images to form in my imagination. And when an image is strong and exciting enough, it can set the tone for the whole project!
This month, I’m sharing a few things that can make a manuscript irresistible to an illustrator - or at least, to this illustrator.
A Computer Called Katherine: When word choice adds up to inspiration
The first picture book I illustrated was A Computer Called Katherine, written by Suzanne Slade. At the beginning of the project, as I read the manuscript, this particular passage, describing a young Katherine Johnson entering high school, instantly inspired the first image I would create for the book:
…she took an exciting math class called geometry.
She learned how points and lines made shapes—triangles, trapezoids, and perfect parallelograms.
And her love for math grew exponentially!
In just a few lines, Suzanne’s writing gave me so much to work with! This passage made me visualize how young Katherine's imagination might look like a colorful swirl of mathematic exploration.
First, “triangles, trapezoids, and perfect parallelograms” provided a treasure trove of shapes and forms to play with. I time-traveled back to high school geometry to mine for other images, like diagrams of circles, cylinders and right triangles.
My favorite part of this passage is the adverb “exponentially.” How perfect is that word choice?! With it in mind, I designed the layout of the spread to mimic the movement of an exponential curve, starting small on the left and growing with a dramatic upward slope to the right. The equations followed suit, beginning small and transparent on one side of the spread, growing big and bold on the other.
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| Initial sketch of the first spread I completed for A Computer Called Katherine |
In conveying Katherine’s “love for math,” I knew our main character would be wearing a joyful, almost awestruck expression as she explored equations in her imagination. And to communicate math as “exciting,” I decided the color for the spread needed to be bright, bold and energizing. I did a few small (and very rough!) color tests to see which hues worked best. I landed on the blue and teal combination, which are complementary colors to the character's glowy, warm brown complexion.
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| A few color tests I did for this spread. The blue and teals won out! |
Just to punctuate how much I was inspired and excited by this passage: this image was not only the first I sketched, but also the first I painted in full color, and I was so thrilled when the editor and art director chose it as the cover!
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| The final product: The first spread I painted for the book, which also became the cover. |
With this first image as an anchor, I now had a visual language I could play with in the book. The blobs and blooms of the watercolor background became a main texture throughout the spreads. And with the help of art director Saho Fujii, we found more ways to incorporate math equations and diagrams into the artwork. As Katherine grows in age and experience, the math in the artwork becomes more complicated. In the book, you can see the progression from a very young Katherine counting and adding, to a professional Katherine using highly advanced computations to help send rockets to space.
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| The math and geometry get pretty complicated by the end of the book! |
The blue and teal spread, where young Katherine is inspired by geometry, also serves as the basis for a callback. Later in the story, a grown-up Katherine is facing some uncertainty about the task at hand, and imagines a worst-case scenario if the math and science aren’t quite right. For this scene, the layout is similar, with an older Katherine also looking up, this time with a worried expression. “What if this all goes wrong?!” (Thankfully, it doesn’t.)
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| A callback to the earlier spread. |
Finally, the geometry of it all is echoed in the endpapers. (Confession: As a surface pattern designer, endpapers are among my favorite parts of a book project.) Again we see the constellation of geometric shapes, but this time, they float on a shimmery watercolor painting of space.
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| I had a blast creating the endpapers. |
I hope you’ve enjoyed this behind-the-scenes look at A Computer Called Katherine, and learning how a well-written text can inspire so many images. Next week we'll talk about words that convey emotions and universal experiences. See you then!
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