Today is Earth Day and I'd like to tell about the process of creating my book 'Can You Hear Me?'
I enjoy spending time outdoors and nature has always been a huge source of inspiration for me. The idea for this book came to me when I was living in Montenegro. Its beautiful nature made me very happy and invigorating and inspired me to make a picture book that would celebrate the joy of being in nature. I wanted to tell both children and parents how important it is not to lose touch with it and I wanted to do this in a simple and poetic way.
I started the work by creating a storyboard with rough thumbnails and text to show my idea to the publisher.
When I make roughs, I don't use lines, I work mainly with shapes and various shades of grey. This makes it easier for me to work with composition and gives a better feel of the final image.
Here you can see the roughs and finals I made for the book.
The book was originally published by Egres in Slovakia. The photo above shows two recent co-editions in English and French.
It was my personal project from start to finish and I'm really grateful to the publisher who gave me a complete freedom. I was able to experiment and make changes the way I wanted. So there weren't any dramatic changes made on the way from sketches to finals in this book.
Together with the publisher we decided to get the book printed with Pantone inks, hence I had to work with limited colour palette. Working with just four colours was the most challenging, yet the most interesting part. It was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.
By overlapping colours, I was able to achieve that nostalgic feel I was looking for this book.
