Writing & Publishing

I Love You Too, I Love You Three Slinging Paint Part 2

Technique After some experimentation with new materials, I fell back on my tried and true method. Using a fine semi-transparent rag paper, which is pretty great all-round for pastels, markers, and colored pencils.  First, assembly-line style, I ruled the paper to 125% of the book’s size. (Always work larger than the final print size.) This paper…

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I Love You Too, I Love You Three The Cover Story

Choosing the cover design   Things I like in a book cover: I love negative-space, also called white-space (which can be any color but in this case, it’s a shiny clean white). Negative space isn’t wasted space. The functional difference between a shovel and a pitchfork is the metal that’s missing. That missing metal has…

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I Love You Too, I Love You Three Slinging Paint

Adding color. A journey from. . . This. . . . . .to this! The story-boarding is done, necessary text changes have been made and all has been approved! Now comes the color. Mr. publisher says he doesn’t want I Love You too, I Love You Three confused with any previous books. Got the blues?…

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I Love You Too, I Love You Three The Style

Illustrating the Book… The Choices. This sweet book, I Love You Too, I Love You Three, (written by Wendy Tugwood, with my illustrations, and published by Firefly Books) turned out to be so well-paced, so well received, that it’s hard to believe there might be a challenge or two in the making of the art… but there were….

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I Love You Too, I Love You Three Storyboarding

Illustrating the Book… Storyboarding. Once the direction and general style of the images for a book are settled, step one in the art-process of illustrating a kids’ book comes with the storyboard. Storyboarding solves the most basic issues in the appearance of the book, which are a whole bunch of things: style, format, continuity, composition,…

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I Love You Too, I Love You Three The Manuscript

The Manuscript Arrives Join me in this series for a tour of the creation of a children’s book from conception to bookstore shelf. Wendy Tugwood’s story I Love You Too, I Love You Three landed in my email inbox in the spring of 2014. There was something magical about her gentle rhyming story. Over time we emailed and…

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Thoughts on Rhyming Books…

While rhyming text seems to fall in and out of favor, I’ve illustrated several rhyming books: I Promise I’ll Find You, Lightning Bug Thunder, and I Love You Too, I Love You Three. And they were all fun and a delight to work on. Over the last few years, I’ve found that whenever I write…

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The Bestseller Syndrome

What Makes a Bestseller? Presumably, anyone with a laptop and spellcheck can write a bestseller and anyone with pencils and paper can illustrate one, and anyone with both can write and illustrate a bestseller. However… thousands upon thousands of books are published each year, but only a few rise to the top. Of course we…

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Edit or Regret It

Many a writer of children’s literature has felt that since their story is just 800 words, self-editing is fine. However, my view is that a second set of eyes never hurts. And if just one errant comma, or apostrophe, or typo is caught before publication, well, hallelujah. Bad punctuation can break hearts…“I’m sorry I love…

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Hi! I'm Sheila McGraw. Welcome, and thank you for visiting. I began my career toiling in the “sequin-mines” of advertising and fashion houses as an illustrator and copywriter. Then, in 1986, Firefly Books approached me to illustrate a little book titled, Love You Forever.

Welcome hyper-typers and paint-slingers to my blog about writing, illustrating, and publishing books for kids and adults; art, crafting, and whatever else tickles my fancy.

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