How To Draw Jingle Bells

I have always wanted to do a How-to-Draw-Horses book. Here is the closest I have come so far. These two pages are from JINGLE BELLS, the new Horse Diaries release for 2014. It is a special edition, and you can order it direct from Random House, at any Barnes and Noble store, Amazon, or your local independent bookseller. The hardcover library edition makes an especially nice gift.

HORSE DIARIES Series News

The good news is that Random House plans to continue the series, after they had decided to stop at #10. The bad news is the pace will be slowed to one book a year. Though for me, that's actually good news. I have other projects to illustrate, and two a year got to be too many for me to fit in. I did take a year off and only did covers for Black Cloud and Tennessee Rose, so that I could finish my picture book, A Castle Full of Cats. (Coming in January 2015 from Random House.) I have already started #12 - Luna. Here are the front and back covers. The book is scheduled for fall 2015.

 

Bell's Star - Book 2 in series

I always use real people and horses for the models for my illustrations. I usually give the manuscript to the models so they can become familiar with their character in the story and can "act out" the part they are playing when I take the photos. I do take lots and lots of pictures and pick the best ones to work from for the illustrations, which are done with graphite pencils of various degrees of hardness. 

Bell's Star is a Morgan and her story takes place in 1850 in Vermont. She and her owner help a runaway slave girl escape to Canada. Here are some reference photos and the illustrations of some of the scenes in the story. I had period costumes made for the models.






























Here is the illustration for the back cover of Bell's Star.

HORSE DIARIES:Elska models

To create the illustrations for Elska, I found models and took pictures of them in costume. I was fortunate to find a gentleman who does Viking re-enactments, and he posed in his own garb. For the children in the book, I had costumes made. I used my neighbor's boys, and for the girl in the story, I found a girl who took lessons at an Icelandic Horse farm! The research and preparation and photo reference for these books takes almost as long as creating the illustrations.

Above is the rough sketch for a scene in the story . Note that the sketch is really pretty detailed. The art director requested that the sketches be more detailed than usual, as they planned to print a "mock-up" of the book for the sales force to show to bookstores.

And here is the final picture, which is a pencil illustration.

Happy trails,

Ruth