The Snow Queen- Creative Process- Part I

The Classic Pop Up and Play concertina edition was published a year ago, and The Snow Queen picture book version was released today by Orchard Books. So I thought I’d share some behind the scenes process images from both of them. You can read Part II here.

The books originally came about after I created a self initiated mini edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. I wanted to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Lewis Carroll’s classic and so I created a series of illustrations and designed a concertina with endpapers, a belly band and hand-bound cloth covers. I sent this out to the lovely art director Paula Burgess at Orchard Books, who then commissioned me for a series of much larger classic concertinas, this time with a laser cut spread and stand up characters!

Our first title together was to be Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, and the laser cut: an icy palace for the Queen.

Here are a series of work in progress images- from first rough idea sketches, to digital roughs through to the final artwork.

Firstly, the introductory spread. This was originally two pages before being extended to three as we experimented with the format; adding the press- out characters to the first page. Since Hans Christian Andersen wrote the tale in Denmark, I wanted to set my illustrations within the city of Copenhagen, and have the characters travel further and further north, through Finland and all the way up to Svalbard, the northern most archipelago of Norway- where the Snow Queen lives.

I loved working on the characters of Gerda and Kai on their respective garden rooftops, and developing their friendship.

I found getting the character of The Snow Queen just right to be tricky, but hopefully I got there in the end.

When Gerda sets off to find Kai, she travels through many lands and seasons, and I enjoyed portraying this- particularly the Northern Lights (I’m desperate to see them for myself- belated research trip perhaps??).

When it came to the pop up palace, there was a lot of experimenting to get the design just right, practically and aesthetically. I really enjoyed working with the team at Orchard Books on this, and worked closely with designer Izzy Jones to get everything just right.

For the Pop Up & Play edition, we went through several iterations of the cover before settling on the final version, complete with silver foiling and metallic Pantone ink- it’s always such a joy to have my work printed to such a beautifully high standard. I’m doubly thrilled that this book has been shortlisted for a British Book Design & Production Award in the Children’s Trade 0–8 Years category.

I’ll share some process images from the picture book edition in Part II…