How I Overcome Overwhelm when Illustrating.

Using a specific example.

This week I was working on a new Children’s Book Illustration for my portfolio. (if you don’t know I am an aspiring children’s book author/illustrator and am preparing to submit my first book to literary agents!). I sketched out this very pretty detailed two page spread of a young witch and her cat chasing a magical fox:

That was the easy part. The difficult part for me sometimes is the painting process! Choosing colors and choosing what to start on causes me to stop in my tracks. There are times I feel a complete sense of overwhelm when facing a larger more detailed illustration like this. I am worried I will choose wronged pour in hours of work into a piece only to have to start over.

BUT! My number one way of getting MYSELF over this hurdle is this:

The hardest part is getting started. Usually if I can pick and finish one small part of the illustration, I can “trick” myself into doing the next part, and then the next and the next until the illustration is suddenly close to being finished and I’m starting to feel really confident about where it’s going.

In this case, I started with the sky. I’ve found that much like traditional painting, when digitally painting I work best going from back to front:

Once I got the sky in I was able to convince myself to do the water and stepping stones:

Once those two things were done the pressure of the illustration was lifted and I was able to hyper focus on finishing the background and foreground:

And then the best part for last! I love illustrating characters the most so I save them as a little treat for myself for making it through the rest of the illustration. ☺️

Completed Illustration: Lily and the Magic Fox by Amber Payne of The Primrose Corner

And just like that a painting that I didn’t even feel like I could start was completely finished. If you are facing a project (any project) that feels daunting or overwhelming I encourage you to just pick one small thing you can work on and see how it goes from there!

Hope this helped you or entertained you in some way!

Thanks for reading 🤍

Amber

The Primrose Corner