Alina Manolache – Designer

Hello!

I'm Alina, a children's book illustrator with a passion for mystery and fantasy themes. I am also passionate about planning things out... Weird right? But I really like to know where I'm going and what are the next steps in the work I do.

My illustration style makes use of naturalistic light and shadow while keeping the characters stylized and engaging. I love using bold lighting choices to create just the right mood for a particular illustration.

I have a well developed process of creating illustrations and it looks like this:

1. Character design - I like to start with the characters and to get everyone on the same page of what they look like, their personality, what kind of activities they like to do. I start with multiple sketches then after we choose one, I will paint the characters to establish the color palette and style of the characters. I like to give a few ideas of color combinations and see which fits best.

2. Thumbnails / storyboard - after I have a clear idea about the characters, I like to create thumbnail size drawings of the book layout and what each spread (two pages of a picture book side by side) looks like. I establish the main action of the page here. These sketches are a bit looser and they just give an overall idea of where the book is going.

3. Color pass - I like to do a color pass on the illustration / book to get the mood established.

4. Sketches - I then take the character designs, and the thumbnails and combine them into more fleshes out sketches.

5. Finished illustration – I will take everything I worked on so far (character designs, thumbnails, sketches) and create the final illustrations.

Each phase will also have an approval stage where I’ll take the feedback I get and incorporate it into the illustrations.

I'm available to create illustrations for Picture Books, greyscale illustrations for Chapter Books or Middle Grade and illustrations intended for Covers.

I don't use generative AI in anything I do.

I look forward to seeing your projects!