The Renfrow Story

Over my lunch hour today we hit a significant milestone. I approved the picture that brought us to the 50% completion point on illustrations! Erica and I both agreed that this is something worth celebrating!

I thought it would be fun to share a glimpse of the process. It starts with the text and the basic idea for the illustration that I’ve provided to Erica. If anything in the illustration is based on something we have a photograph for, I get that to Erica to work from. Then she starts drafting, sending me bits and pieces as she goes for input. With the time difference between Grinnell and Seattle, it often works that she’s connecting with me when I’m on my lunch hour or just at the end of the day so we’re able to keep things flowing.

Here’s an example using the page in the book that talks about the influence of the Uncle Sam’s Club in Edith’s life. Erica works with a digital art platform creating her drawings by hand, but in layers. For this one she started with a photo of the club from the Digital Grinnell collection. Her first illustration had it in brick, so that had to be adjusted. With that background layer ready, she moved on to the characters. After much discussion about what they should be doing, she drafted the college student with Edith, her brother Paul, and two other students in the circle playing ring-around-the-rosie. Once she filled the details in for the character layer, she placed it on the background. Doing it this way allows for the placement and size to easily be altered.

With the illustration done, next comes the text and tying it all together.

Many images there is nothing but imagination to pull from. One of the most challenging was one that I also think is one of the most powerful. This two page spread tells of how Edith learned her family stories from her mother. There was a lot to convey in this page, all stemming from the relationship Edith had with her mother, but involving the powerful and difficult family stories to be shared. This is one of the early drafts of the page.

After review, I needed to clarify that when Edith’s grandmother was taken away as a child, the image was of her riding away in a wagon. It’s a powerful part of the story Edith tells, and it’s conveyed in a quote from the article “Up From Slavery” published when she graduated Grinnell College in 1937.

With this additional information, the various images were finalized and now it was time to place them and create the overall look and feel for the page.

And finally, the addition of the text.

You may notice that the image of Edith here matches that of the front cover. (We will probably end up taking the flowers out of this one as they were part of an idea we were playing with at the time that has since changed.)

There are a total of 22 two-page spreads in the book, not counting the title page and such at the beginning and the end notes, which will include my notes and images and other details about Edith which I plan to put together. I think the most complicated illustrations have been completed. I’ve learned a lot about what works well and what takes longer, so I have adjusted and simplified some of the illustration ideas. Needless to say, we are hoping that things will continue to move slowly and steadily forward at a pace of about 1 spread per week. That will put us finishing somewhere in October and getting it off to the printer by early November. Erica and I are both doing all we can to get this book into people’s hands by Christmas, but it’s going to be tight.

Here’s hoping that the Edith magic can pull all the pieces together to make that happen. If not, then it will be early 2024 and we will celebrate just the same.