Illustrating—Heaven's Wait Becomes Visual

It wasn’t long before my mind started pestering me to produce some concrete images for all the character and landscape ideas floating around. After all, part of my master plan was to weave simple illustrations into my project. In their previous lives, when they lived in my remedial reading workbook, my main characters had faces and styles, but the illustrations that had been drawn by an artistic high school student didn't quite match my vision of the creatures. So I dug into the illustrating program, Freehand, and also into Photoshop to see what I could come up with.

I was obviously taking on a lot by trying to write and illustrate at the same time, but the processes actually worked well for me. I was on this freewheeling creative journey, with no time constraints and no rules. When I found myself stuck or uninspired with my writing, I put it aside and worked on what the characters and their unusual town looked like. I settled into Photoshop to build the characters because I liked the way I could easily create layers for the different body parts. However, I soon found the program limiting for that type of illustrating. I realized I needed to learn Adobe Illustrator if I was going to pursue graphic illustration.

My primary character took about two weeks to create, because I had to convert him over from Photoshop, and I was such a rookie at Illustrator at the time. Each of the four other characters who play the biggest roles took about a week to design. The five were distinctly different from one another, so once I got their designs down, it was pretty easy to design their family members by modifying facial features, hair, heights and costumes. The work was tedious, but it was so much fun to see the characters and their families come to life, one by one. I was eventually able to add portrait shots to my database, which made the characters seem more and more lifelike.

Illustrating their environment was another story. I didn't have an illustrating background from which to draw. In my youth, I had taught myself to draw tulips, desert landscapes and the girls in the Breck hair product ads that were on the backs of most magazines (I'm showing my age). But that was about it. So I played around in my Broderbund 3D Home Design Suite, which included home and landscape design, to see what I could develop. It was a godsend. Though the process was painstakingly slow, I was able to build not just one home but the entire community. I furnished and decorated the characters' homes (though only with earthly items), and eventually built their gardens, paths and various landscape elements to create the unusual town that lay hidden in the world of Heaven's Wait. With the program's 3D features, I was able to walk through the neighborhood and home interiors and make them fit the personalities of the inhabitants.

Of course, the program came with proprietary restrictions, so I couldn't publish the scenes I created. The graphic elements, pre-designed furniture, plants and textures belonged to Broderbund. For the time being, I was happy simply to see my world coming to life. I took snapshots of the environments and placed my characters in front of them, making my world feel so real, it was almost scary.

I quickly learned, however, that it wasn't easy to place the characters in their settings. They needed to be proportional to the environment, as well as to each other. Back to Access! It was time for some math. I went back to my primary character and calculated the ratios of the other main characters to him. Then I calculated the ratios of their relatives to each of the other characters, and added the statistics to their Access profiles. That way, I would always know how big a character was in relation to others who shared the same scenes. Also, once I set the ratio of the primary character to his home environment, the rest of the placements were calculable. Whew!