Hello, folks! Can you believe there are only two days left to this blog party?! 😱 It's gone by so fast!

Today, Savannah and I are both sharing some of the illustrations in our books! We both drew our own illustrations; I personally love illustrated books, but I haven't found very many.

Let's start with a group picture of all the guys in the squad - plus everyone's favorite black kitten. 😁 This exact picture isn't in the book, but the guys' illustrations are, and Boogie also gets his own illustration. (They're not colorized in the book, though.)

I knew I needed to include a character list because there are so many guys in the squad, and some of them have similar names (all those J's!), but I also wanted a way to include pictures of them. So . . . what better way than to combine them both? 😇

Now, I realized that not all my readers would know what I was talking about with all the equipment and such. So in addition to the pictures of the main characters, I also drew pictures of the guns . . .

. . . vehicles . . .

. . . and other side characters.

And of course, we needed some illustrations of the action!

I'm not particularly good at drawing freehand (at least in my opinion), so for all of my illustrations, I used reference pictures to trace over. Most of them were photos from the war, but a few were from reenactors. Fortunately my brother has a Wacom art tablet that he let me borrow; that makes digital art SO much easier!

With each illustration, I had to include enough detail to make the picture look realistic enough, but not so much that it overwhelmed the overall image. In addition, I had to sometimes fill in blurry parts, remove paratrooper pockets from pants (because paratroopers had a different uniform from standard GIs), and adjust the faces so that they looked like my characters. (Sometimes that included easy things like adding glasses, mustaches, or freckles; sometimes I had to entirely reshape facial features!)

Here's a couple to compare the original photo and the illustration:

I had to do a lot of intensive work on this one! The version I used wasn't as good quality, so that definitely didn't help. But you can see I changed faces - dropping Logan's head onto the dancer's body (!) - and adjusting the guy by the Victrola to make him look like Steve (plus adding the sergeant's stripes). I didn't bother putting a lot of detail into the background, just leaving the faces blank. (That's a tip I learned from an art course I went through - don't add maximum detail to everything, otherwise the intended subject of your picture won't stand out!)

Also . . . I don't know if anybody has noticed this, but in all of the big illustrations I wrote the initials "TC". In the credits at the start of the book, I have "Illustrations: Phoebe Hinkle (signed Tristan Campbell)". See, Tristan is an amateur artist who's always sketching things around him . . . so I thought it would be a fun little touch to sign the drawings with his initials!

If anyone wants to print these off and color them (hint, hint 😉) you're more than welcome! 😁

That's all for now, but before you go, enter the giveaway if you haven't done so already!

And check out Savannah's blog - remember, she's sharing her illustrations too - and our lineup of other bloggers!

• L.E. Levens
• Addison Crissone
• Sophia McCrary
• Journey Bloomfield
• Emily Brown
• Katja Labonté
• H.C. Kingsley

Your song of the day is a WWII classic: "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree (With Anyone Else but Me)"!

Tomorrow is V-E Day - and WGOT's publication anniversary! - so I'll be talking about what the guys did after the war. Also, I'm writing a guest post on Savannah's blog about the Donut Dollies! 🫡✌️🪖