Take a peek inside award-winning author-illustrator Melissa Castrillón’s sketchbook as she tells us a bit more about her working process on her latest book Can You Keep A Secret? which has been chosen as the Children’s Indie Book of the Month for March and tells the story of a little girl called Winnie who discovers some magical, mythical creatures…
Below are some early sketchbook pages for Can You Keep A Secret?
| In these sketches I’m looking to figure out which beautiful beasts would feature in the book and how our protagonist would look. I love, love, love this stage, everything is so new and there are so many exciting possibilities!  |  |
Next up colour. For me colour is what brings the whole thing to life and it sometimes comes quite easily but on other occasions it can take a while to nail down the perfect palette.
| The palette for Winnie’s story, Can You Keep A Secret was a bit tricky; it’s my tenth illustrated book and third which I’ve also written, so I didn’t want the palette to feel like any of the other books I’ve produced. Amazingly I’d never used hot pink in my previous books and since it is one of my favourite colours that went in the bag straight away. It was then a challenge to find colours which emphasised the magical and fantasy element to the story but which could be flexible to work with both daytime and night time scenes. |  |
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The book itself is printed in spot colours, similar to a mass produced screen print technique, where each of the five colours are printed separately. This provides a really vibrant finish and also allows each colour to blend when layered, to produce secondary colours. It’s an amazing way of doing a book! And I feel so lucky to have my book printed in this way, it’s really old school and the finished book is so vivid.
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And here’s the finished book, hope you enjoy it!
Thanks to editor Alison, art director Zoe and the team at Scholastic.
Thanks to editor Alison, art director Zoe and the team at Scholastic.
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 | Thanks to Melissa for this fascinating post - and who doesn't love a good endpaper design - we'd like this one as wallpaper! |