The Final Year Show

The final year show took place on Thursday 19th and Friday 20th of May. It was a great way for us to showcase the projects that we put so much work into over the last year. We set up our stands to relate to our projects.

I went with an a2 poster as well as printing off my visual diary again and placing it around the wall. I bought various different garden items such as trellises and artificial grass. To relate to the character I purchased tennis balls, dog bones and a red bowl which all appear in the book on page 14.

I was very happy overall with the look of my stand. I have attached some images below.

Colour Changes

I have come to the conclusion that the dark pages in the book are indeed too dark. I really wanted to keep the grey as I know through experimentation that the blue shades were too heavy. The main difficulty here was that the background was not the only grey on the page. There was the garden wall and the character of Clancy. This is where I had to try some different ways to make the font more visible.

I initially tried out Clancy in the shade of the background and the background as Clancy’s colour. I found this dark grey took away from his detail and I wasn’t happy with it. However, using the lighter grey as the background made the spreads look a lot better. So the problem lay with Clancy.

After getting feedback from a friend to change Clancys colour to that of an auburn/maroon shade, I said I would give it a go. However, after doing so, I wasn’t happy with this at all. My vision for Clancy was grey and this didn’t fit the bill at all.

An idea struck to go back and re-visit the idea of putting Clancy in a very light grey, almost white shade. I have attached below the newer on the left and the old shade on the right. I was thrilled with this. The last step was figuring out what shade to settle on for the wall and the background.

Finalised colour scheme for dark pages:

The final design actually worked out to be simply flipping around the colours that were already there. I used the previous colour of the wall for Clancy. I used the previous colour on the background for the wall and I used a very similar colour of Clancy for the background. I felt this really flowed well and the pages became instantly brighter. I was delighted with the finished colour scheme.

 

 

Page 11/12

Page 11 is strictly font based, describing the scene thats happening on page 12. Gonzo hears a loud noise and jumps up and stumbles over his toys. Again, I used my storyboard for my initial drawing of Gonzo, but to my advantage the kennel did not have to be drawn again. I copied it in from page 10 where I then zoomed it up and altered it slightly in order to fit the page and the scene better.

Keeping everything organised on Illustrator is very important for me. I made sure to keep my layers separate to avoid any confusion.

The mouth that I had originally used for Gonzo, I felt didn’t fit right. I experimented with some different shapes before realising that I had a shocked expression drawn on Gonzo’s face on page 5. I copied this in and found it fit perfectly.

 

Word Layout:

Laying out the words differently on pages can really add to a book. I displayed the words while putting the emphasis on the word ‘Noise’ to give a loud effect.

This is a contrast to the size that I have the writing in the rest of the book which is 52. It gives an added effect.

 

Finished spread:

I am happy with how this spread came out. I altered anything that I thought needed changing throughout the process.

Page 3/4

Page 3 and page 4 of my book are the pages that I completed for my initial prototype in January. I understand that I am under a certain amount of time pressure now and I did not want to start the pages again from scratch.

I had already re-visited and changed the mother and son, and a lot of changes have since been made to Gonzo, so the process of simply replacing these old illustrations with the new ones was an easy one.

As I want some pages of my backgrounds to be full of colour, I added block colours instead of strokes this time around. I added a gradient to make the light hit the sky and grass in the correct way.

Finalised Spread:

Pencil Pete

With the vast amount of fonts made available today, selecting the right one was more just a process of elimination. I scanned various different font websites, searching for the perfect one. As the visual style of my book is very much done in a hand drawn style, a pencil stroke font was the look I was going for. I have included an example of what I mean below.

Throughout this process, I noticed that I was always comparing the fonts to one that I found at Christmas time called Pencil Pete. I think the font is perfect in both its style and in it’s suitability for children. (Attached below.)

After downloading this font at Christmas time, I never ended up using it in my prototype due to licensing details.

I went back to the place where I originally downloaded it and found the website where it can be purchased. It was called Joe Bob graphics, and the fonts full embeddable font was for sale for €12.

This all seemed well and good at the start, but I ran into some difficulty with the website as the payment method is PayPal and I found that once you were redirected to Paypal, Joe Bobs hadn’t displayed the relevant information on the site to complete the payment. I have since emailed the website directly from the site to try and get some answers for this. I hope that the issue will be resolved as this font ticks all the boxes for me.

For the moment, I have the trial version of PencilPete that I can use until the issue is resolved.

 

Page amounts

I found through my research that picture books are almost always 32 pages. The reasons for this are purely physical as when you fold paper, eight pages folds perfectly into what i have learned is called a signature. Any more pages means it results in a group of pages too thick to bind nicely.

I also found that in other cases (although rare), picture books can be 16, 24, 40 or 48 pages, all multiples of eight (a signature); but 32 pages is industry standard. I am not sure however that this will affect me, depending on my printer choice. The book baby printing service allows you to send single pages for pdf and would mean its not required to be bound in such a way. Also, the addition of a hard cover would also change the way mine will be bound, as opposed to an average book.

All in all, it was good to know this information. I knew roughly that my book would add up to approximately 34 pages. With this new information in mind, I am going to aim for my book to add up to 32 pages altogether, just to be safe with regards to printing at the end.

I sat down at very roughly wrote out which stanzas will be allocated to which page and page number. This really helped me get a clearer vision and I feel that I am almost ready to begin my storyboards. I have attached the notes below.

Supporting Characters

Book Baby

I became fairly disheartened after being told no by so many companies but I continued to search.

I came across a website called bookbaby.com and I loved the website from the moment I stumbled across it. It is highly professional and focuses primarily in the printing and binding of children’s books. I sent them an email in which they asking some details, as the company is American and I could not ring them. They proceeded to tell me that there is a process on the website that you can follow which gives you and exact quote to match the specifics. I followed this process and was happy to see that they offer a size very similar to mine which is 10 x 10 inches. The process to follow was very simple. I have attached details below.

I was very happy with this process and will most likely use them for printing. The only difficulty I face is that they can only offer 1 copy or else 25 + copies and no in-between. The price different for this is substantial. I got in touch with the company via email regarding a few concerns.

This settled some of my concerns about paper weight, minimum orders and production times. I will definitely be considering going with this company for print.

Gonzo – Finalised Character

The finalised character of Gonzo that I have chosen is similar to the original style that I came up with. However, going back and breaking down Gonzo’s features, allowed me make changes that benefited the character and add something extra.

The main changes made were the addition of the front legs, making it easier for me to draw Gonzo from side angles, the ears, where I added an extended left ear of the character, and the introduction of a tail, making it more realistic and adding to the character. I also made Gonzo a couple of shades lighter, after experimenting with different browns.

 

Gonzo Food Inspiration

Messing around with different ideas led me to taking inspiration from different foods for my main character. I initially made the observation that Gonzo’s chosen body shape resembled an onion, which gave me the idea to illustrate an onion-styled Gonzo in Adobe Illustrator. Again, this gave me more opportunity to mess around with colour ideas.

 

I then continued to represent Gonzo as different fruits, purely for experimentation and visualisation reasons!