A grateful summer day!

Illustrating an award-winning book!

I'm currently knee-deep in working on my new graphic novel. With school starting soon, I couldn’t work on the book as much. So, I've been living under a rock and pushing to get as many pages done as possible. I paint intensively every day and don't get to do much fun stuff.

On one of these scorching hot and mundane days! A carrier pigeon flew in and brought me an exciting email from my author pal, Nancy!

Our book - One Perfect Plan has won the Florida Authors and Publishers Association 2024 President's Book Award! YAY!!

Creating a book is fun, but it definitely takes a lot of time. You pour all your love and heart into it, hoping readers will enjoy it as much as you do.

The book's final section delves into the topic of Revelation, a part of the Bible that I find abstract and challenging to interpret. I went through many sketches and discussions with the team to come up with the final design.

Below are some of the brainstorming sketches for the book's final spread.

I wanted to represented God through non-human visual symbolism. However, the challenge lies in finding a balance between abstraction and clarity. The visual storytelling in most of these ideas could be challenging for younger readers to understand or could be misinterpreted as a "world peace" or "save the environment" kind of public service announcement.

At the end, the team and I chose to design of the spread with classical holy trinity symbolism.

Final sketch design

Final Art

If you'd like to read more about the creative process behind this book, click the link to access the One Perfect Plan collection, which includes a special edition interview with the author, Nancy Tupper Ling.

Click the image to see sample pages from the book!

Making a book takes a while, but it's worth it to know it brings joy, peace, and escape to readers.

Big thanks to Nancy for your trust and letting me illustrate One Perfect Plan, the Florida Authors and Publishers Association for the recognition, my awesome agent Marietta Zacker, and the Penguin Random House teams for their support. Shoutout to my friend Casey Robin, an amazing artist and theologian, for inspiring my illustrations with fun Bible stories.

And, of course, thanks to all of you readers for the love!

XOXO,

Alina 💛