Elliot Wright – Design

This week I prepared to present my work to the group before making the final push on my childrens book. As I learnt last time the importance of exporting presentations to PDF, I made sure to do this the night before. After giving a brief recap of where I was I talked through my later development and prior designs for the childrens book and then showed them the completed page. At this point not all pages were fully finished so I brought in the only one that was complete to give a feel of the approach I was going for. The group seemed to give a positive reaction and seemed happy with the experimental text and imagery. I was worried that the experimental font style might be difficult to read but it didn’t seem to cause problems. One thing that I was disappointed about was I still couldn’t sort the mock up PSD of my ink bottle. I tried to adjust the label size prior to the presentation but to no effect. I should report now that this still can’t be amended as the label size is locked to be a certain size. As impractical as this is, it is still worth keeping the mock up to give a sense of the style of bottle.

I’m pleased to report that the book has been completed on time with many hours dedicated to getting it finished. Kudos to Frankie for showing me the eps method as it saved me what I can only imagine would have taken hours to get not even close to the standard achieved with image trace. Fortunately for me, the final assembly of the book took a lot less time than drawing all the visual elements. Then again, I feel that by drawing them freehand I will have got a much better product than by drawing with a mouse. For a project like this, perhaps the use of a drawing tablet might have suited better however I would have had to learn to use one which might have set me back weeks.

Overall, I think both projects have gone well. For someone who doesn’t have any tattoos I think I’ve created something quite special for High Seas Ink. The kids book I’m also quite pleased with. I also intend to pursue my Lowry style book at my own pace to allow the best possible outcome. For now though, I’m very satisfied with Colours.

After scanning in all my designs, I’ve started piecing together each individual page. During this stage I began to realise that the inspiration for this style might have come from a guest lecturer from a designer who had illustrated a book about penguins. Like me, he also used a real life drawing style which I thought was really effective at the time. What differs from his work to mine is how I’m using the page to colour my drawings in rather than individually colour the characters. Having said this, I think that both our styles work for their purpose.

After scanning in the images, I realised that although I fine lined the images, they still were quite faded. Fortunately my co student, Frankie Frost, advised that I turn the images into eps files by using the image trace tool on Illustrator. This was because I could enlarge and reshape my images without losing image quality. After a brief video tutorial from Frankie on Facebook I gave it a go. Some were harder than others, for example the infamous telephone box had loads of detail which would create strange grey colouring in places. To fix this I simply coloured the grey patches the same colour as the image page on in design. This was quite a long process but, for the improved image quality, it was worth it.

Another key aspect of the book that required heavy thought was the use of text. As I had been quite reductionist with the illustrative style, it allowed room to be more experimental with the text. The font I decided to go for was Minion Pro as I felt it reminded me of the sorts of fonts I’d seen previously in many childrens books. Instead of choosing a font which differs from other books, I decided to manipulate the font by enlarging words and how the text appears on the page. For example, colour names are often a little larger than other words to draw emphasis on them. What I would argue was the most experimental use of text is on the green page. As there is a tree to the left of the text, I decided to shape the text in a tree style. This I feel looks very effective.

One thing that I wasn’t sure on was how I’d end the book and what would appear on the cover. As I felt this was quite an arty book, I thought it would be fun to have the book in a ring bound A5 format much like artist sketchpads. Most of these come in a black cover so my cover is also black with the name of the book and my name written in white in the centre. I wanted to originally leave it blank like an artist sketchpad so a child can perhaps play with there sketchpad and pretend they did all the drawings themselves. As much as I’d have liked this, this wouldn’t be at all practical when the book is on sale in shops. Therefore, the compromise was to make the text smaller as to not take up the whole book.

For the end of the book, I wanted some form of explosion of colour, whether this be with splats of paint or something else. I began to make these splashes of paint only to feel that this was too much of an obvious choice. Instead, I decided to do something more personal. Last year I experimented with colour by using circles which grow bigger and bigger while also slightly changing in colour. This creates something which I found very appealing visually. This considered, I decided to make what I call a colour ripple to bring my book to a close starting with purple and ending in orange as I hadn’t mentioned these in the book. This I felt was a nice way to end. This will all be pieced together from now up until deadline. With careful planning it should be ready in time.

To expand on my branding guide, I produced a few more pages of potential usage of the brand. I’ve designed a mockup ink bottle design using a PSD Mockup. At this point I am quite pleased with it however, I’ve had some difficulty getting it to fit nicely onto the bottle. The mockup allows you to change what appears on the label but doesn’t allow you to change the shape and size of the label itself. This means that I have large white patches surrounding my label. For now this is ok however I’d like to amend this if possible. The labels however are all finished.

I’ve also produced a mock page for the tattoo catalogue. As I like the ordered layout of the brand guide itself, I figured this could continue into the tattoo catalogue. After producing the layout, the adjacent page explains the way I think the pages should be laid out. 6 tattoos maximum per page so detail is not lost. If a tattoo needs a bigger image, substitute some of the smaller tattoos to allow room. This I feel will allow customers a good view of the tattoo before they get it done. At this point, I think I have included everything in the brand guide. However should I think of anything else I will add it into the final two pages.

Over the Easter Break I continued part of the visual element of my children’s book. I decided that the style I wanted to pursue was to have a photo realistic outline of say a whale or a duck and have the colour take over the entirety of the page.  I had seen many books of this style which have either the image be the only thing coloured in or with it partially coloured in as if a child had attempted to do it. None of what I had seen has done what I’m going to attempt to do.

To do this, I had to do some realistic drawings. To do this I found an image off the internet and sketched onto paper. I’m glad that I decided to do this over the Easter break as this was incredibly time consuming, with each drawing taking roughly between 2-3 hours each. After reciting the colourful dictionary many times and a lot of erasing, the images have finally been completed. These will need to be scanned in and coloured on Illustrator. Pictured below is a line drawing of a telephone box for the red page which took the longest by far. This was due to not only the fact that it required the most detail but also I had to re draw it as I slipped in the fine lining phase. All the images need to be fine lined in order for my scanner to pick up an image clear enough to use. Fortunately, this has nearly been completed which means that I’ll be ready to assemble all the elements needed to complete the book.

After many attempts to come up with something, I finally came up with an idea mid workshop this week. Instead of aiming for something too ambitious, I decided to opt for something even more basic. The book will now have no story line. It will essentially be an exploration of colours for toddlers. Each page will be dedicated to a colour, the entire page will be that colour and will feature a few illustrations of objects and animals which share that colour. The colour will also have a short rhyming couplet so it’s a little more fun to read. Simple yet effective.

I have written all the rhyming text which fortunately didn’t take long. Each bit needs to be short and sweet so i’ve written little rhymes such as “Lots and lots of things are green, what sort of green things have you seen”. It’s not exactly the work of Tennyson however, for children of this age group, it doesn’t need to be.

I will now hunt the internet to find an illustrative style I like and begin creating as soon as possible. I am currently torn between doing my line drawings either photorealistic or in a more child friendly cartoon. Hopefully I find a style I like soon.