Month: March 2016

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.

Before I can actually begin visualising what I need to draw, I need an idea of the story. So this week I have essentially brainstormed as many possible story ideas I can to see if I can think of anything worth developing further. Sadly, this hasn’t led to inspiration at his point.

Something that commonly appears in children’s narration is rhyming. I used to be quite good at rhyming however I have struggled to write an entire story thus far in this way. The longest story I managed to come up with was a tale about a man who owned a shop and had a cat that would abuse people when they came in. This would obviously lose the man business and the cat would have to be removed. Nearing the end of the piece I finally realised that the idea that originally was to be a comedy piece for the parents like “Go The F*** To Sleep” by Adam Mansbach had turned into an inappropriate mess. The story was then rightfully scrapped.

My second idea was a story which essentially was never ending. A boy would tell the story of his town which essentially went to work every day then went to bed. As boring as this sounds I liked the idea of this sort of industrial revolution work machine and thought it would be an interesting thing to try. The drawings would have been in the style of  L.S Lowry, an artist from Manchester famous for his “matchstick men”. I did try and pursue this however, after realising how long it would take to create this city scape on each page I realised I may not have enough time to complete it. Although I will not go through with this now, I would like to save the idea and perhaps try again when I don’t have time constraints. Perhaps as a side project.

I will continue to research and hope for inspiration. The sooner I can come up with the story, the sooner I can begin production.

Last week we had a short introduction to our next task which is to design a children’s picture book. Growing up I obviously interacted with lots of these kinds of publications however this came to a holt probably when i was about 4/5 years old. Since then I haven’t really seen many. This week I put the branding design on hold and looked into a few popular books, some of which I recognised, some I didn’t. Books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Not Now Bernard and Elmer are all books I can remember vaguely perusing in nursery. The stories I couldn’t really remember however the pictures are quite easy to recognise. One thing that will be interesting is that, up until this point, my designs have been targeted at an older audience, therefore the images need to look professional. Publications for children however do not. This considered, I may try picking up a pencil myself for this task as thus far I have only used a computer. Now may be the time to try.

This week I have began building on my previous research on the match book and have made a very rough diagram to explain it’s layout. Fortunately, matchbooks are relatively simple to make as they are essentially a cardboard pocket. On the front of the matchbook, the white logo will be placed on a black background. The inside I am yet to decide fully however I would be tempted to have no form of background and have the logo and contact details stamped onto the naked cardboard. This would have quite an interesting dynamic to the matchbook. We shall see how this develops in the coming weeks.

More and more on the streets of Lincoln I see lamp posts and street signs decorated with stickers from a variety of different causes such as Amnesty and night clubs; particularly in areas associated with young people. Although mostly ignored by older generations, younger generations will read them in passing. As I am trying to draw a younger audience for High Seas Ink, I think stickers will be a great way to promote. I produced a black sticker design with the logo first as it seemed like an obvious choice in colour. This was effective however, with further experimentation, the sticker looks good in a vast selection of colours which exceed what I had in mind for High Seas Ink’s colour scheme. In the branding guide I will show stickers that abide to the branding identities select colours however, in actual application, it might be worth distributing more colours. Perhaps different stores will have their own colour? Or maybe they will be sent a random selection of colours to distribute. Who knows at this point?