Milo: The Process - 1. Knights and jesters

My picture book process for MILO THE KNIGHT, Part 1

Jul 19, 2024

As most of you know by now, the English edition of my third picture book as an illustrator, Milo the Knight (written by Grégoire Laforce), will be released in November of 2024! The French edition (Milo le chevalier) will hit the shelves in North America and in Europe about a month before that. Yay!

Preorder the book!

I spent over 8 months working on this book, from exploration to final illustrations. I want to share with you some of the thinking, research, sketching, and long hours at the drawing table that went into this picture book. This is the first post of a multi-part series titled “Milo: The Process”. Subscribe (for free) so you don’t miss the next posts!

This first part will focus on characters, because that’s where I started - it’s where I usually start.

Actually, that’s not true. I started, as I always do when I illustrate someone else’s text, with reading the manuscript.

Can’t say no to a medieval insect world

Grégoire Laforce’s manuscript told the story of Milo, a knight living in the shadow of generations of knights before him. Like all knights, he prides himself in being strong and courageous and in keeping his armor nice and shiny. He feels duty-bound to defend his colony against dragons and has no time for playing and dancing around - unlike the court jesters, who he observes from afar. Their life seems fun, sure - but knights will be knights, and Milo has no time for nonsense! One fateful day, while Milo is training outside the castle, rain causes his armor to rust and seize up, leaving him stuck and alone. I guess I won’t spoil the ending for you just yet, but let’s just say it involves Milo learning to be vulnerable, accepting help, and shedding his identity to find freedom.

I liked it, and I was even more excited when I read a comment my editor made when she sent me the text: “I think the main character could be a beetle”.

She was referring to a beetle I had drawn a year or so before. Here it is:

A pensive beetle I drew for no particular reason

A medieval insect world? I was in!!!

An inordinate fondness for beetles

While, at first, I considered making the knights and jesters and villagers different types of insects, I decided to make them all different beetles instead. British scientist J.B.S Haldane once (reportedly) said that if there is a creator, he certainly has “an inordinate fondness for beetles”. There are approximately 400,000 species of beetles on Earth, and they are incredibly diverse in shapes and colors. That made for really fun research as I started to imagine my characters.

I spent a morning sketching beetles at the Montreal Insectarium.

The Montreal Insectarium is a wonderful place!

It was all the more inspiring because the Insectarium is full of school groups on weekday mornings. There were so many kids around! Most of them just wanted to know if the insects were dead (they are). Most adults accompanying them were uncomfortable answering truthfully. At one point, this enthusiastic autistic kid came up to me and drew a tombstone for a butterfly in my notebook. It was a great morning.

Tombstone with a drawing of a butterfly and RIP on it.

Here are some of the sketches I made at the Insectarium:

And here are a few more I drew from photos I took at the Insectarium and from library reference books at home:

After all that looking and drawing, I felt like I had a better handle on how beetles were constructed, and I was ready to make them into characters.

Beetle knights

Turning beetles into knights was a lot of fun, because their exoskeleton kind of looks and works like an armor with all its rigid moving parts.

I studied medieval armors from library books and sketched a few I liked:

I was particularly interested in figuring out how to draw helmets

Then I started sketching beetle knights! This is the first one I drew. His armor was wayyyyy too complex and the two pairs of legs were awkward to draw. Two pairs of arms felt much more expressive.