Day: April 22, 2016

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.