Process for The Sound of Silence
Written by Katrina Goldsaito and illustrated by Julia Kuo
pub. August 2, 2016
Purchase from your local bookseller, Amazon or Bookshop
I was fairly new to picture books when I illustrated The Sound of Silence, so I spent some time at the beginning of this project deciding what I wanted to achieve with it. At the time, I was trying to find ways to incorporate more line work into my art. I certainly succeeded!
I also declared that I was going to have fun with this project, so I snuck many easter eggs into the art. The Shibuya scene is littered with references from Hayao Miyazaki. My favorite novel at the time, Haruki Murakami’s “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,” is held by a passer-by trying to escape from the rain. And the author and my parents are standing among the crowd on the wraparound cover!
But what shaped the book more than anything else was the incredible team that worked on it. Alvina Ling and Bethany Strout, the masterful team at Little, Brown and Co., had the brilliant idea of using color and saturation to depict the change in volume as the book progressed. Katrina Goldsaito, a first-time author and all-around creative genius, came up with this manuscript as part of a story-a-day writing exercise with her husband.
The Sound of Silence is still one of the most unique children’s books I’ve ever read, and I feel so honored that I was able to illustrate it.
Here’s a look at how I built my images in Photoshop. I first drew the ink linework on paper, which was then scanned in to Adobe Photoshop. I then colored the digital image the way you would in a coloring book using my tablet and stylus.
There are some extra details added outside the lines, like shadows and textures. You can see at the very end of this GIF that I added in Yoshio’s red hat onto the side of his desk - I thought the bright red of the backpack in the cubby needed some balance elsewhere!
This is one of my favorite spreads in the book because I hid many easter eggs in the buildings and signs. If you look carefully, you can find a sushi banner from the movie Jiro Dreams of Sushi, an okonomiyaki ad (writer Katrina Goldsaito's dad actually authored a book on okonomiyaki!), the Beard Papa cream puff logo, and many references to Studio Ghibli movies.
This spread was particularly complicated, so I did the ink drawings in many parts: first the buildings, then the people and Yoshio, and lastly the rain. I drew these on different pieces of paper and stitched them together in Photoshop before coloring it all in.