Illustrator Cris Arbo gives us a behind the scenes look at how she creates her artwork. For those who have a copy of the Dawn books mentioned, you will enjoy matching up the real life references to the scenes depicted in the books. Cris’s art has appeared in books, magazines, calendars, cards, murals, and in animated feature films, TV shows, and commercials. When not at the drawing board or visiting schools she gardens and explores the beautiful countryside near her home in rural central Virginia.
I am fascinated by detail, particularly that found in nature. People remark on how complex my paintings appear to be, but they are actually based on the simplicity that I find in the structure of nature. If I draw a form, say a dandelion seed, and repeat it over and over, it creates a pattern and appears as a whole; in this case a dandelion puff. If I can find 200 different forms to repeat in a painting, interweaving and overlapping them with one another, the result is the appearance of a larger form – a whole, the image of the painting you see.
Our visual world is put together in this way. Billions of forms with their own sets of patterns interact with one another to make larger forms and so on. What an amazing world!
Working on nature books for kids allows me to help others to see the detail and beauty of our natural world. I want to make the viewer feel like they are in that world, not just looking at it. My past experience in theater helps me with this. An illustrator needs to be a producer, director, choreographer, set and lighting designer, as well as an actor. Portraying characters (be they people, insects, animals, or plants) that the viewer can empathize with is so important.
In my books you will see lots of visual subplots that are not mentioned in the text but serve to complement and aid the storytelling, i.e., in All Around Me I See there is no mention in the text of a family on a hike. The family, specifically the little girl, allows the reader to “travel” with them, seeing the world they see.
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All Around Me I See My daughter, Arianna, as the mom; her brother-in-law, Jack, as the dad; and our friend Makayla, posing. |
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All Around Me I See To get the feeling of the little girl flying in her dream, my daughter, Lisi, coached Makayla on the trampoline. (We put fairy wings on her and as she bounced up and down she exclaimed, “I’m a fairy, I’m a fairy!”) |
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All Around Me I See I needed to portray a bullfrog leaping. Although I could hear them in our local pond, I never could catch any. However, we knew our friend, Jay, who is very fond of frog legs, might be able to help. He caught this one at night. The frog was a cooperative model and we let him go by the river after the photo shoot. |
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All Around Me I See At the end of the story the dreaming girl returns to the family tent which is backlit by a huge moon. The car headlights helped me envision what the tent would look like. |
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The story of In A Nutshell portrays an acorn which grows into a 300+ year old oak tree. To show this passage of time I created a world of human activity, something not mentioned in the text. This idea was sparked by a suggestion from my husband, Joseph Anthony, who authored the book. Joseph also built a model of the log cabin which I used as a reference to help me depict the cabin in the book.
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In A Nutshell Joseph is a carpenter as well, and built this scale model for me to work from. He remarked it was the fastest he ever built a house! |
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In A Nutshell Joseph as a pioneer carrying a “log” for the cabin. |
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In A Nutshell Pocahontas and John Smith assisting me in depicting the cabin at an early stage. |
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Thorough research of my subjects is extremely important. I use real life, the library, and the web to make sure my details are correct. I also have a large collection of nature magazines and drawers full of photos filed into categories and sub-categories in my studio.
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Some of my reference magazines. | |
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When portraying a person or creature several times in a book I need to see how each part (arm, leg, foot) would look at various angles.In The Trees, Honeybees shows hundreds of bees coming and going, and I had to make sure every angle of every body part was accurate. Since we had a hive of feral bees in a tree in our back yard I had the opportunity to observe and photograph them myself.
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In The Trees, Honeybees The entrance of the wild hive in our backyard. I was quite a distance away with a zoom lens. |
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In The Trees, Honeybees On cold days the bees are sluggish. This gave me a chance to have a close look inside. There were some dead bees near the entrance, which I brushed onto the cloth below. In the studio I could examine them closely with my magnifying glass. |
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Depicting the creature accurately is not enough. The ecosystem in which it functions and all the creatures and plants it interacts with must be accurate. For the “Bee” book I had to learn their behavior and their complex social system. I had to make sure the shape of the honeycomb was depicted properly and the brood, honey, and pollen stores were all in the specific typical placement honeybees use. Rendering all those hexagonal chambers in the proper perspective was a definite challenge! I learned as well that honeybees will forage some flowers for nectar only and other flowers for pollen only. So much to learn and to depict accurately!
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In The Trees, Honeybees A worker collecting nectar from a sedum in our garden. |
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Champions Of The Ocean has eight biographies of ocean explorers, and each chapter begins with an anecdote of that person as a child. For those who had been born in the late 1800′s to early 1900′s their childhood photos were either of poor quality or non-existent. Often I would use a model who I thought resembled that person as I imagined they would have looked as a child.
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Champions Of The Ocean Our friend, Zachary, as William Beebe peering through the bushes. |
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As a girl, Eugenie Clark used to visit the New York Aquarium. The Aquarium’s photo archivist helped me with this by furnishing photos of the Aquarium’s interior around 1930 when it was located in Battery Park. I added Eugenie and some seahorses to help the experience come alive. I often use friends & family members as models as well.
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All Around Me I See Jack, Makayla, and Ari |
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In The Trees, Honeybees My daughter, Julie, as the mom in our backyard garden. I also used a photo of her as a girl to portray her own daughter. |
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In A Nutshell Our daughter, Alina with Joseph. |
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In A Nutshell Our friend, Michael, as the other half of the swing duo. |
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In The Trees, Honeybees To get a bee’s-eye-view I took this one of Joe “going to work” in the morning. |
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In The Trees, Honeybees Again from the roof, this is Alina. |
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In A Nutshell Our friend, Frances, as the mom “eating pie”. |
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In A Nutshell Our friend, Martha, “picking cherries”. |
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I love working with my husband. Since he wrote In A Nutshell and The Dandelion Seed we were able to bounce ideas off one another. He often comes up with clever ideas for our projects that I can develop into illustrations, and we have several book projects in various stages of development which we hope will eventually become published books.
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The Dandelion Seed In order to portray the seed floating over the house at night, I took this shot of our house from the treehouse. As the illustration is a night scene, I went back up into the treehouse at 1 A.M. when the moon was casting its light at the angle I wanted. I sat up there (it was about 20?) for about an hour memorizing the colors, which are so different at night! |
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There are so many stories to tell — each illustration has its own saga, and when I visit schools I love to tell the kids tidbits about how each illustration came to be. I also like to show the process of how the books were created using sketches, models, and finished paintings. Giving talks, for me, is a great way to balance the solitary time I spend in the studio creating the books.
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Cris, I enjoyed reading about the process you use to develop the illustrations in your books. The text you wrote makes the reader want to know more. Maybe you might consider writing a book about your journey as an illustrator. It might be inspiring to young people when considering a career. As a former school teacher, I developed a small library of career books for my students. They enjoyed reading and learning about different careers. In my search I never found any books on becoming an illustrator that appealed to the young reader and offered an “inside look” into the process.
Just some food for thought.
The website and your blog are very nice, and I enjoyed both the text and the pictures…Sakina