Behind the Scenes | Julie Augensen

I love to watch the ‘behind the scenes’ footage of movies, so I thought that it would be fun to share with my readers what it was like to create a book.

Ida Louise and The Lucky Sweater is a culmination of my real life travels, made-up characters and some real people in my life. Below you will see five different sets of pages, the last being a spread across the spine of the book which is actually two pages. One image is the original black and white story board which my illustrator, Cartalya, sketched by hand. The color image is how she began giving the page life. After the storyboards were scanned into the computer, all the remaining illustration was completed on the computer.

You will have to look inside your book to see how the final pages compare to the sketched story board and the first color images.

Page 1

I asked Cartalya to make Ida Louise’s house on a hill overlooking the famously photographed sea side streets of Bergen, Norway.

I showed Cartalya a map and some pictures of the port side city (also seen on the back cover of the book.) This is how she captured my vision.

Look closely against your copy. Do you see what item changed color?

Page 2

Since Ida Louise loves museums, so I knew I had to show her in one. I wanted to depict Ida Louise’s fascination with travel, so we featured three famous landmarks.

Page 3

The postcard is the most important image on this page. I asked Cartalya to zoom in on the storyboard so that the postcard could be bigger. She marked the storyboard with rectangle around the image, indicating that she needed to zoom in. As you look in your book you will be surprised to see what was illustrated as an afterthought.

Page 4

Almost every page that has Poochie Pat on it is my favorite. Cartalya is excellent at drawing him. On this page I wanted the dog and the sweater to be equally important.

I had a difficult time explaining to her how I wanted the dog to look as Grandpa carried him home. So I had my mom take a picture of me holding my cat as a reference for Cartalya. It worked. He looks exactly how I wanted.

Ida Louise’s grandpa is a culmination of my dad and my grandpa who was born and raised in Norway. We changed the background of this page (from a circle to a full page illustration) because of what was on page 5.

Page 14-15

There isn’t a big difference between these two images. The reason is because it is a re-creation of a shot that I took from my tour bus window when I was in Alesund. It was my husbands and my favorite day in Norway. We toured the Stave church on the left and I have a funny picture of my husband in front of the grass roofed house. I love this page.

Cartalya and I laughed a lot while she was illustrating. One day in particular Cartalya had made Poochie Pat big and dropped him into this scene so he looked like a giant dog taking over the countryside. I cracked up because he was so huge. Then Cartalya did a click and hold and dragged him around the scene making a growling sound. It was hilarious! Well, maybe just to us.