Katie Weaver / Illustrator
Katie Weaver has always had a love for art. Since childhood, she has had an artist's heart and an entrepreneurial mind. Weaver has always found herself in creative fields from sculpting and designing cakes that are too pretty to eat, to designing and executing large scale events and weddings, to selling artwork, of all types. Recently, she has taken on a new interest and love for children's books where she uses her passion for art to tell a story through her creative illustrations. This book is her first pride and joy. When Weaver's not illustrating, she's chasing after her four sons, spending time with her husband, working on home projects and dreaming of the art she will create next.
Like Ninni, Oodles and Oodles of Noodley Noodles is Katie’s first book! She’s always dreamt of illustrating a children’s book and this one was a lot of fun to work on! Throughout the process, she and Ninni became great friends and made this journey even more fulfilling. Here, you can see Katie process for illustrating this fun and colorful picture book! Katie also did the book design, designed this website and all the graphics. You can see more of Katie’s work on her website: www.ALittleOffbeat.com
After Ninni approved the entire book of story sketches, Katie got to work on the colored, final versions of each page. Katie uses a MacBook Pro, Wacom Screen Tablet and a Pro Pen 2 to draw onto the tablet, by hand. Each illustration you see in the book was drawn by hand (see video ———> sometimes Katie’s children liked to “help”, too! Ha!). Each full page spread (a “spread” is the two pages you see together when you turn a page) is created in whole and later split into two pages. Each spread took Katie 3-6 days to complete, depending on the details. Once the story was fully illustrated, then Katie moved onto all the “other” pages. This was a great area of the book to use illustrations that “didn’t make the cut” for the story itself. For example, the very first
illustration of Charli, painting on an easel that reads “This book belongs to:”, was initially sketched for the page where Charli has a food fight with her dad! Katie and Ninni thought the food fight would be much more fun for the readers. :) But! that illustration turned out to be perfect for the “This book belongs to” page.
The first stage to illustrating a children’s book is character development. Initially, Ninni had envisioned a little brown-haired boy named Grayson as her main character. And then, one day, she had the thought that it should be a “little girl with noodle hair” and just like that, Charli became a girl! :) During character development, it’s important to identify the character’s age, gender and appearance. Katie went through many renditions of Charli before Ninni and Katie decided on the Charli you know and love in the book!
Once the character(s) are decided on, the next step for Katie is to get to know the character at all angles. She drew Charli giggling, angry, upside down, looking left, looking right, shocked, and scared! This helps to ensure Charli looks like Charli with each turn of the page.
Once Katie felt comfortable with Charli and knew her inside and out, she started to sketch the story in a process called story-boarding. This is where the illustrator decides on a general idea and layout for each page.
Once Ninni agreed to the storyboard, Katie got to work on detailed sketches of each page for Ninni to approve. To the left, you can see some of the sketches. Katie uses her iPad Pro, Apple Pencil 2 and Procreate to sketch these.
Here’s the cover design!
Once all the interior illustrations were complete, Katie went back to edit the text placement, coloring, sizing and variation to make it more fun for the reader to… well, read! Then, all interior illustrations and text were sent for final review to Ninni. Next was the cover and back cover design. Katie and Ninni wanted a cover that represented how colorful and silly the book is and, after one really bad night of terrible ideas, Katie had the idea of the current cover and Ninni was also excited about it. It took over a week to draw the cover and back cover, but it was well worth the time and effort that went into it - Katie and Ninni both love and are proud of it! Once it was decided that no more edits were needed, Katie finalized the book design using software called InDesign and created final files needed for the printer.