From the Sketchbook:
Kayla Miller
This CBC series features illustrators sharing their creative process and providing context for their art. Featured today is Kayla Miller, who wrote and drew the middle grade graphic novel Click, the first book in the HMH series.
Olive “clicks” with everyone in the fifth grade—until one day she doesn’t. When a school variety show leaves Olive stranded without an act to join, she begins to panic, wondering why all her friends have already formed their own groups . . . without her. With the performance drawing closer by the minute, will Olive be able to find her own place in the show before the curtain comes up?
“This is the first drawing I did of Olive and her family when I was starting to plan out characters for Click. I knew from the start that I wanted Olive to have black hair and braids. I decided to make dark hair a family trait that would visually link her to her mom, aunt, and brother.”
“Here is a spread from the sample pages I did when my editor for Click, Elizabeth, and I were pitching the book. We had an idea of the plot, but I’d only written a small sample of the script, which included this sequence of Olive daydreaming about being included in her classmates’ acts. This sequence made it into the finished book, though some of the character designs changed quite a bit.”
“Before the book cover for Click went public, this is an image I used for promotional postcards. She has items that represent the different acts that her friends would be doing in the variety show, and she’s kind of struggling to carry all of them. This was supposed to be symbolic of how she works to balance all of her relationships and how she wants to be involved in the various groups.”
Kayla Miller
A cartoonist, author, and illustrator Kayla Miller lives and works in New York. They have a BFA in Illustration from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. When not busy working on graphic novels, Kayla enjoys watching bad movies, trying to cook new recipes, playing games (both board and video), and reading other people’s graphic novels.
