Fortunately, The Milk: Part 2

The story of illustrating a children's book by some guy named Neil Gaiman

It’s What’s On The Inside That Counts

I had never illustrated a novel before and wasn’t quite sure how the process worked. I assumed I would be given a list of things from the book they wanted me to draw, but that turned out to not be the case. They let me go through and pick whatever moments I wanted to show. Since I’m not someone who digs a lot of rules and guidance, this was perfect for me. I printed out the manuscript, grabbed a highlighter, and start picking scenes. Once I was done with that…

…I threw it away.

I realized that I loved everything Neil had written and that I had highlighted nearly every single sentence, meaning this was going to end up being the world’s longest picture book, instead of an illustrated novel. So I printed it out one more time, and showed a bit more restraint the second time around.

I did loose sketches for each of the scenes and sent them in for approval, assuming they would ask for a ton for changes. To my surprise, they asked for NONE! The only change really was asking for a few more spots they wanted to include in the book.

The Nib Or The Brush, That Is The Question

Now that it was time to jump into the actual illustrations, I needed to decide how I was going to approach the finishes. I’m usually a brush person, but I thought this project would be a good time to try something new.

Instead of using my thicker, juicy ink lines, I decided to use a nib, which has a much thinner line and allows for a much sketchier, scratchy finish. I thought this would work well with Fortunately, The Milk since it was going to be printed in black and white. I normally rely on color to help add depth and texture to my work, but I couldn’t lean on that with this project.

The more line based style really added so much energy and movement to my art throughout this book, which I think complimented Neil’s story of a father that was always on the move between space and time.

Everything But The Kitchen Sink

Pirates, aliens, ponies, umpires, and dinosaurs were all fun to draw, but fortunately, THE MILK was the funnest!

Weird, right? We decided to drawn a bunch different images of the milk bottle and spilt milk to place throughout the book. I decided to treat the bottle like it was almost alive to help sell the movement the rest of the book has. I loved finding new ways to bend and twist it.

As Is

The most shocking part of this whole job was how smooth is all went. I turned in all the art for this book and was not asked to change single drawing. Everything was accepted as is. I assumed a master of imagination like Neil Gaiman would be very particular how his words would be interpreted but again, I was wrong. He seemed to love collaborating and was so gracious with his replies as I turned in the work.

The only note he gave me was to take out the watercolor texture on the white background of the cover, though it had nothing to do him not liking it. One of his other books that was published around the same time had been delivered to a bunch of booksellers completely water damaged. He was afraid the watercolor texture I added would look like another book that suffered the same fate as his last. I couldn’t argue with that logic and was impressed that he was so passionate about every part of the book making process to think of that.

Tune in next time for PART 3 to find out what happened after the book was published.