Lessons learned and the end of the unit...

Today I went to get my images printed at copyplus in town. Now, I've been working to the scale of 25cm squared images, meaning that my double pages are 25 X 50. So I found out that due to the size, they would need to be printed on a2 sheets, which are priced at £7 each! So obviously that wasn't happening. The woman was nice though, she said that we could scale them to fit on a3 and then it would cost under a fiver for all three images! So obviously we did that. With that in mind, I'm adjusting my book pages to 22cm X 44cm. Who would have thought that 3cm difference would amount to so much! Also, they ALWAYS come out darker than I'd planned. I even compensated for this by lightening them a little but I guess my laptop screen has the brightness set pretty high. I'll have to remember that for the finals. Other than that it was really nice to see them to scale. It allows me to look at the images and decide whether I can apply more detail in the way of additional creatures and stuff like that, just to make the images more engaging for kids. The below post is pretty much my entire hand in. This blog is really where the action happened, you see a lot more of the working process here. My hand in box will contain my first draft script with notes, my final draft script with notes, 31 a3 pages of sketches and my 3 print outs from today. I hope that's enough.

50th post!

Here's another *final*. Of course, calling these images finals may be a little presumptuous. Things are bound to change. I'm not sure there's enough contrast in this image but with the crease in the page and the text it might look a little more complete. We'll only known when we've got some prints sorted out.

Update...

I redid pages 3 and 4 with the new design of my creature. I did a screen shot of the design with the smaller spines too but I preferred the bigger ones. Also, here's a wip of my new double page spread...

The F*****G Gruffalo...

A friend yesterday brought up that the style of my book so far was looking similar to that of the gruffalo. So I asked another friend whether it was too similar. We discussed similarities in other mediums too such as comic book characters having similar costumes, illustrators styles resembling others etc but eventually decided that if I was too worried about it, then I should tweak my character designs and perhaps even consider making the world more fantastical. Now realistically, it's the textured colouring that is making this a similar style to the gruffalo, but the creatures do share other traits in common with that design too such as two horns, exposed teeth, yellow eyes and sharp claws. None of this would be a problem if it wasn't going into the design of a character that shares the same genre as the bloody gruffalo.With that in mind, I did some character tweaking to try and make it more reptilian and leave behind the *monster* angle.

I've posted this to my facebook page for feedback so I'll be waiting for a little while before deciding anything. Although I've pretty much already decided on the elements that I like from these designs. I'm thinking that the tongue hanging out is a good indicator of the takers being reptiles. The soft spines replacing horns are good for the child too, whereas the adults can have sharper spines. I like the lighter coloured belly, it goes back to my original thoughts on the takers resembling bipedal crocodiles. I think I can get away with keeping the huge ears. Oh also, since we are going fully reptilian now, the other takers can have a variety of features like these too. For example, the chin spines of number 10 will look great on the adult male takers because it resembles a beard. So based on my own preferences, it looks as though the protagonist is going to be a mix of 2 and 7 at this point.

On a side note, if I DO make the world more fantastical, then I'm instantly leaning towards volcanoes and shit. Mainly because now it looks like I've gone prehistoric and this is a book about dinosaurs. That might be taking it too far though. Just a thought.

Finished 3 and 4...

Well that's another couple of pages down. Below I've got some of the wips from this morning too.

By this point I had added a tree with a little creature. I thought maybe the little creature could follow the girl as she meets various other takers. I also made the girls eyes bigger. In the top left I've started drawing one of the images of the takers taking.

By now I'd shrunk the image down a little more, added some loose feathers and changed it to a red hue. I think the hue gives it a dream-like or imagined quality that helps to keep it separate from the real colours of the linear story world.

And here's where we ended up. I've left gaps for the text and as with the first one I may revisit any of these images again before finalising the book.

Pages 3 and 4 wips...

In my last post I mentioned that I needed to change the original page idea to a different angle for fear that it was too similar to pages 1 and 2. I tried that (as you can see below) and instantly didn't like how it was going. I left it behind pretty early into the process and instead moved forward with my original plan. I'm liking how it's coming along! I did hit a few snags though, such as the idea of the smoke portraying her thoughts - that doesn't work. Neither do thought bubbles. Granted I wasn't actually putting much effort into testing these because I'm pretty burned out on drawing right now and needed a break. So the next step would be to figure out how to portray all that suffering on the left hand side. I guess I could have them as stand alone drawings resting on the backdrop. Who knows. I'll think about this while making me some bad ass dinner.

This is the first shitty attempt of the day

This is the smoke as the backdrop for the images that will be on the other page.

This is the thought bubble.

This is the image as it stands right now.

This is a little close up of the protagonist and the fire - which I think look quite nice.

Justifying decisions...

So even though I seemed set on the large thumbnail for pages 3 and 4 that I posted earlier, I've decided on something ever so slightly different. Basically I was looking at it and decided that it was going to be too similar to pages 1 and 2. I don't want variety for the sake of variety but there's also no point in reproducing the same image over and over with slight changes each time. So in this image, my smokey images will still happen, the little girl will be laying next to a fireplace and we will see all of this from above. Also, later in the story I reference where the girl lives, so either this is a cave, a hut or she's outdoors. If she is in a cave or hut then I may have to change the first image again. You can probably see why this takes so long to get a book made. Plenty of faffing.

One note on this image. I'm not sure if I even need to show the animals being taken in the *thoughts* of the girl. It might be enough to just show various animals since the written aspect already conveys the action.

Oh and also, the image at the start of the sheep creature about to be taken is going to be made a little more poignant. As you will see, the different takers have different skin colours. The first one she encounters will be taker who is eating animals. He has green skin. So this might go unnoticed by the reader, but in actual fact we will be seeing the taker eating the dead body of the sheep creature that we saw on the very first page. I fucking love continuity! I might add a further reference to it somehow too, but I won't know how that will look until I get thumbnailing that page anyway.