TRIALS

No, not that kind of trial, involving sweat, tears, blood, and suffering. Rather, trials as in "trying-outs". Experiments. When I am starting on a new book, I often make multiple trials of the media I might use. Sometimes trials will involve ink, pencil, or paints. Sometimes they involve the paper, as in these examples.

For the trials in these photos, I cut samples of 8 different papers, and applied brush and watercolor in the exact same way to each paper. Going from left to right in the photos, I labelled my trials: "Wash", "Scrub", and "Drybrush." Wash is a straight watercolor wash. (Note that under this "wash" sample I wrote "pimples as it goes on." This paper was disqualified immediately.) Scrub is what I sometimes do with the brush if I want to remove some color. (This is also a good test for the resiliency of the paper under multiple washes and re-workings.) Drybrush is using the brush with watercolor very dry, so it acts almost like a colored pencil. (Another note: the different color of some of the drybrush samples here is a trick the camera played. In real life they are the same color as all the other samples.)

These trials were preliminaries to the illustrations for "The Cats In Krasinski Square", a picture book written by Karen Hesse. Such trials can be tedious and time-consuming (if for example one needs to let them dry overnight) but they are always worth the time and trouble. And they are just as valuable whether one is working with hand tools or on the computer. Much better than finding out mid-illustration or mid-book that one's media are not up to the task.

And sometimes---if the media insist on behaving capriciously, or one is unable to find any media that satisfy one's inner vision---these trials can in fact become "that other kind of trial". Such is the life of the conscientious illustrator.