Picture Book Brief – Page 2

March 7, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Picture Book First Draft

After all the illustrations had been drawn and converted to vectors I created a mini storyboard on how to apply them for the picture book, the layout below is how I want the story to progress, although it’s currently very early in terms of completion, I believe this will be the final story layout with only minor details that may change along the way.
The illustrations I made turned out a lot better than I initially expected, and although they looks somewhat rough, I feel as though this style will benefit the story I aim to make with it. The next stages are to work out a colour palette and add supporting graphics to progress from this current stage.

March 3, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Initial Picture Book Draft

The initial sketches of the picturebook involved 3 different poses of wolves, with 3 different emotions highlighted through the face/eyes. Whilst the picture book at this current stage is very primitive I feel as though it’s a great start for further development. On the first page I also experimented with a colour for the main wolf, this will later be used to distinguish the most prominent character from the others. The font used at this current stage is Futura, I feel as though it makes for easy reading, and is legible regardless of what background I put it on.
Whilst the setting or some of the theme’s may change throughout the process of creating this book I feel as though it’s good to reflect on the very early stages regardless, it helped me a lot throughout the branding brief and I feel it’ll do the same for this brief too. Overall I’m confident with the progress and development at an early stage.

page 2-01

page 3-01

February 29, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Research for Picturebook

After researching some illustrators briefly, I decided to narrow my focus in finding an artist whose style I liked and wanted to inform my own work. After searching through examples on pinterest and google image search, I came across an Illustrator called Anita Jeram. Jeram is an illustrator of children’s books and some of her work focuses on simplistic flat colours with heavy hand-drawn characters, the style I found was something similar I wanted to replicate which I felt was achievable despite my own abilities within illustrating to be lacking.

Overall the illustrations seem simplistic, whilst maintaining an element of design which can be conveyed easily into telling a narrative for children, so I feel as though this is the most appropriate for the style I’m trying to achieve.

February 29, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Initial Character Development

For the second brief of Semester B, we were tasked with creating a children’s book dealing with difficult themes, yet making it digestible and not too heavy for children. For this brief I played around with some different character designs, my first was a snake, but after choosing my theme I found it difficult to apply the character I designed.
The next sketches I made were some general facial expressions along with some sketches of wolves, to make these I drew them by hand, and scanned them with Adobe Capture. Capture allowed me to turn hand-drawings into instantly editable vectors compatible with Adobe Illustrator, from here I tidied them up and made supporting graphics to go along with them.

February 26, 2016Brandon Barton No Comments

Picturebook Development Plan

During the workshop of week 6 the group was given a new brief simply called “Picturebook Brief” the brief requires us to create a minimum of 8 pages regarding themes which children may find hard to deal with, the idea behind this is to get us to think about how we can deal with diffcult subject matter, and make it applicable through illustration and Typography making the topic more digestible for children.

Before setting out and creating the brief there was an obvious learning curve of what’s expected from us, and how we can tackle this. There was obviously an emphasis on some components which at first seemed somewhat commonplace and easy to overlook, however paying close attention to what’s expected, I now know that there should be a lot of attention paid to Typography and Colour, focusing on these two elements gives the book more visual coherence and overall makes the end product a lot better.
During the early stages of the brief I will focus on colour palettes and typography research, this should help inform the end product and make it a lot more professional. One final element I will look at will be the ability to rework and change ideas, a lot of the time designers think what they’re doing is final and good enough to submit as an end product, this is something I want to avoid unless I’m 100% certain of my own ideas.

Development Plan

The development plan for this brief will detail a time schedule of all the elements I’m working towards and when I want them completed by. I feel as though time plans are a good tool to use and stick to so as you understand how to spend on each component.

Week 6 – Research/Project Planning Stage

Name for the PictureBook
Research on inspirations (Artists, Authors)
Look at examples I want to influence my work on
Progression with the Design/Overall Branding

Week 7 & 8 – Concept art and further ideas development

In-depth picturebook research (What conventions do I follow, examples of how to compose a narrative for kids, how to make the end product look/feel thematically appropriate? )
Rough sketches (Concept art, Character art)
Experiment with Typography (how does it look/feel with supporting illustrations)

Week 9- Further Illustration Exploration

Finalised Title (Reach a point where I know what I can improve for the cover/title)
Typography evaluation, new choices from old, variations and how well it works
Further Character concept art, Settings for the book, Environments Etc.
Upload Sketches – Evaluate Likes/Dislikes
Further develop environments, showcase potential settings for the character

Week 10 & 11 -(Easter) Final Tweaks

Finalised Illustrations (What character am I using? What Environments/Themes?)
Room for improvements (Are the sketches representing of the book enough positively? Room for tweaks?)
Finalised Colour Palettes

Week 10 onwards – Polishing final output

Have a finalised booklet 8/10 pages
Character development finalised uploaded to blog separately
Colour Palette and supporting work uploaded to blog
create final Pdf for the semester, uploading both projects.

Research & Source Material

https://uk.pinterest.com/search/pins/?q=illustration&rs=typed&0=illustration%7Ctyped