Happy Thursday! I’m Veronica Miller Jamison, picture book illustrator and soon-to-be-published author-illustrator. I’m happy to join you as the guest blogger for the SCBWI Blog this month.
Last week, I shared how a few short lines in John Schu’s This Is A School inspired my first sketches for the book, and helped me create the visual narrative. This week, I’ll be going inside the process of creating the main character and one of my favorite illustrations from Jennifer Swanson’s Up Periscope: How Engineer Raye Montague Revolutionized Shipbuilding.
Up Periscope!: Personality in Action
Up Periscope! was a delightful manuscript to read and a fun book to research. Another American “hidden figure,” Raye Montague (much like Katherine Johnson) was a brilliant Black woman whose mind for math and computers helped push engineering forward. She was the first person to design a U.S. naval ship using a computer.
In reading both the manuscript and Raye Montague's biography, Overnight Code, I learned that Raye was gutsy, tenacious and spirited, which informed the way I designed and applied action to her character. One of my favorite details is that Raye took a job at the Navy as a typist, fully intending to teach herself the skills to become an engineer (whether her bosses liked it or not!).
Jennifer captured Raye's ambitious spirit in her writing, demonstrating her tenacity as Raye tackled several obstacles throughout the story. The author emphasized Raye's moxie with this refrain: "Raye knew she could learn anything, do anything, and be anything!" So my goal was to bring that pluckiness to every piece of artwork. (Raye's bright eyes and gap-toothed smile made that an easy task!)
 |
| Character design for young and grown-up Raye Montague |
The other “character” in the book is the UNIVAC computer, the first American computer designed for commercial business use. This thing was massive and intimidating. The interface was complicated, with all sorts of buttons, switches and knobs, and the rest of the equipment took up entire rooms. I collected just as many research images of the UNIVAC and people using it as I did of our heroine, Raye.
 |
| Image via Wikipedia. |
 |
| Image via Wikipedia. |
A spunky main character and a formidable piece of computer equipment come together in one of the turning points in the biography. Raye, who hadn’t been able to use the UNIVAC in her office but had been secretly taking classes at night, suddenly needed to jump in for a whole staff of engineers. Jennifer Swanson writes it like this (emphasis mine):
One day, all the men who ran the computer were too sick to come to work. Raye jumped up and took over. Although she’d never touched the machine before, she knew which buttons to push, which levers to flip, and which instructions to type to get the UNIVAC to solve calculations.
What would it look like for one woman to take over for a whole team of engineers? While my research photos showed multiple people working on the computer at once, I imagined Raye, with her boundless ambition and energy, “jumping up” (in Jennifer’s words) to fill all of those roles. The verbs “push,” “flip,” and “type,” led me to the different actions Raye could be doing around the computer, in a flurry of activity.
 |
| The original thumbnail sketch for this scene. |
 |
| A smidge more detail. Emphasis on "smidge." |
When it came to deciding on color, I wanted to use a more limited palette than my previous projects. Starting with my personal faves, cobalt and phthalo turquoise and naples yellow, I developed a range of hues and shades. The olive and chartreuse tones weren’t used in the book; I added pops of lilac and orange (complements of yellow and turquoise) instead.
 |
| Color swatches from my sketchbook. Acrylic paint was used here. |
So for this spread, I thought orange was the perfect color to emphasize Raye’s flurry of movement around the aqua-colored UNIVAC equipment.
 |
| The final artwork! |
The idea of Raye independently moving around the UNIVAC appears one more time, later in the story. This time though, she’s on deadline and exhausted. Dark purple is the predominant color here, and the color scheme is mostly monochromatic, as Raye is essentially living in this room and has become one with the UNIVAC. The one pop of color comes when the telephone rings with an important call.
 |
| Same idea, different scene, different stakes. |
It was fun to play with this concept - one woman doing many jobs - in different scenes with different emotional states. And it was all inspired by the way the author used her words to describe a tenacious young woman proving how capable she is.
 |
| The bright-eyed and ambitious Raye Montague! |
No comments:
Post a Comment