A behind-the-scenes look at how nonfiction book illustration gets made: from the first archive rabbit hole to the final collage spread.
People often assume that illustrating a book starts with drawing. For me, it starts with reading.
Before I pick up a pencil or cut a single piece of paper, I spend sometimes months reading. I dig into historical texts, old cookbooks, folklore collections, academic papers, and digitised archives that feel like portals into other centuries. I look at paintings from the period. I track down what people wore, what they ate, what their houses looked like. Research is such a crucial part of creating engaging nonfiction children’s books!
This is the part of the process that most people don’t see, and it’s the part I find hardest to explain because it doesn’t look like making anything. It looks like reading, and occasionally staring out the window, with reddish eyes.
But it’s where every good illustration comes from.
It’s a nonfiction illustrator in the wild!!
The archive rabbit holes
When I was working on Tasty Tales, my debut book about food history and folklore, I discovered that some of the best source material lives in the public domain. Old cookbooks that are hundreds of years old, available as PDFs. Food history texts going back centuries, articles written by people who have spent careers thinking about why the croissant has that particular curve, or how a sweet Egyptian dessert got its name from something bitter.
I gather sources from all over: archives, university library websites, Google Scholar, museum collections, specialist food history journals. When something is behind a paywall, I often find that a library can help, or that an earlier version of the research is publicly available. I take notes in Google Docs and tag sources digitally, though I’ll be honest that I also have notebooks full of scribbles that are significantly less organised.
For each new project, I build what I call a CSI board – except on my computer rather than the wall, because I do like my visitors to think I have all my marbles. Mind maps, flowcharts, connection diagrams: the material starts to form a shape before I’ve drawn anything at all.
The goal at this stage isn’t just accuracy. It’s finding the story inside the story. The politics behind a potato. The trade route behind a spice. The person who got erased from the historical record because they didn’t fit the narrative someone else wanted to tell.
Sometimes I take ‘notes’ like this.
From research to visual language
Once the research has reached a critical mass (and mess…), once I know the world I’m drawing well enough to invent nothing, I start building the visual language for the project.
This is the mood board phase. I collect images: paintings from the relevant period, photographs of objects, architectural details, textiles, food. I’m asking: what did this actually look like? What colours would have been available? What did a kitchen in this era feel like? What would someone have been wearing while they did this?
Then I start sketching loosely, quickly, just to see what the composition wants to be. These sketches are terrible. They are for my eyes only. But they’re how I figure out where the energy in an image lives, where the viewer’s eye should go, and what the picture needs to say that the words already cover.
Working as both author and illustrator means the words and pictures grow together from the beginning. I’m not illustrating someone else’s text; I’m building the whole world at once. This changes things.
How I sketch!
Building the collage
My finished illustrations are hand-crafted collage: cut paper, painted textures, pencil detail, and digital tools layered together to create richly textured spreads.
The process starts with the painted papers. I paint large sheets in the colours and textures I need and then cut and arrange them into the scene. On top of that foundation go the drawn and painted details: faces, hands, food, small objects that carry the historical accuracy I spent all that reading time gathering.
I work digitally at the end of the process to refine colour and composition, but the core of every illustration is physical. The paper has weight. The paint has texture. You can see, if you look closely, the edge of a cut, the brush mark in a background wash.
I think this matters for nonfiction especially. History is physical: it happened in real buildings, to real bodies, with real tools and real food. Collage feels like it was made by someone who cared about the material reality of the past.
And then it all comes together.
What the process actually looks like, week by week
For a book project, the timeline typically runs something like this:
Research phase (weeks 1–8 or longer): Deep reading, source gathering, visual research. Building the world before drawing it.
Concept and rough sketches (weeks 4–10, overlapping with research): First compositional ideas, character development, palette exploration. These roughs go to the publisher or editor for feedback before anything is committed to.
Finished roughs (weeks 10–20): More developed sketches that establish the full visual language of the book. At this stage everything is still moveable — but the direction is clear.
Final artwork (weeks 20–??): Building the actual collage illustrations, one spread at a time. This is the longest phase and the one that requires the most sustained focus.
For editorial commissions, the timeline compresses significantly, a magazine illustration might move from brief to finals in two to three weeks.
Why nonfiction illustration is different
Fiction illustration and nonfiction illustration require different things from an illustrator.
In fiction, the illustrator’s job is to extend and enrich a world that the author has already established. The imagination can run ahead of the facts. In nonfiction, especially nonfiction for children, who are forming their understanding of the world, the illustration has a responsibility to be true.
That doesn’t mean dry or literal. The best nonfiction illustration is warm, surprising, and full of personality. But it also means that when I draw a cooking pot from 18th-century Edo Japan, it should look like an 18th-century Edo Japanese cooking pot. When I show the clothing of a medieval baker, it should reflect what medieval bakers actually wore.
This is why the research comes first. Not because accuracy is more important than beauty, but because in nonfiction illustration, accuracy is a form of beauty.
Interested in working together? I’m open to commissions for children’s nonfiction books, editorial work, and institutional projects. Get in touch →
You can also see more of my process and research in The Illustrated Kitchen, my monthly illustrated newsletter about food history.