©DON TATE
ILLUSTRATION
Using models
I almost always use friends or family as models for the characters of my books. If no one comes to mind I'll put out an advertisement on Austin's local SoulCiti e-newsletter. Finding the right models is always the most difficult part of illustrating a book for me. For whatever reason, I find this process awkward.For example, the book THE LEGEND OF THE VALENTINE, called for an 8-year old African American boy and a gray-haired grandmother character. A neighbor suggested that I visit an inner-city library because, she said, there were many children there on the weekends accompanied by their grandparents. I went to the library, saw a kid that I thought fit the character perfectly. I approached the adult with the kid. I explained that I am a children's book illustrator, that I needed a child model as reference to use for my paintings and showed her some of my books. She frowned up her face, looked me up and down suspiciously then walked away like I was some kind of freako or something. "No thank you, she mumbled." Most times I do find the right model. In fact for the book SUMMER SUN RISIN', the girl who served as the model of my main character had a younger 4-year old brother. He was so cute and full of personality that I had to work him into the illistrations as well. I also ask the editors to include my models names on the credit page of the finished book especially when the character in the book doesn't look like the actual kid that modeled. That way when the kid tells his friends he modeled for a particular book, he has proof.
For this book I didn't feel like dealing with that model process. Besides that, I needed a fat woman to pose as Mama bear and I didn't even want to go there. Although a few people came to mind. So I decided to make creative use of my digital camera. With the use of mirrors and the camera's auto-timimg, I served as my own model.
Although I did create clay models of the animal faces, nothing quite takes the place of live people at capturing expression and body lingo.
I also use a computer program called Poser to create realistic models. Poser allows me to create my own virtual people that I can pose, reposition, adjust lighting or camera angle and print out a realistic image to paint from.