History Maker Bio Illustrations

Last summer we illustrated six books for Lerner Publication's History Maker Bio series. These biographies are aimed at elementary and middle schoolers, but also sit well with twenty-somethings, as I can attest to. Fittingly, the series of books we were involved with were all about company founders (see the list below).

A big part of our job was trying to match the previous artist's style, which meant doing drawings that were a little looser and a little more painterly than we were used to. The illustrations were drawn as line art on paper, then scanned in and painted using a low-opacity brush in Photoshop (using a wacom tablet).

We haven't received our comp copies yet, so I'm still not sure how the actual printing turned out. Hopefully we'll have some copies for the Twin Cities Book Festival this Saturday!

There are roughly 800 History Maker Bios out there, but here are the ones Big Time Attic illustrated:

Juliette Low
Henry Ford
Levi Strauss
Madame C. J. Walker
John Deere
William Kellogg