I didn't wait long for Yuyi's feedback and when I got it I was very excited.
Hi Kristen, here are a few comments, very minimal. I think that you should start planning on breaking the text. Based on her comments, I made my revisions and when I was happy with them I was surprised by my subsequent inaction. I sat and sat. I looked at my text. I sat some more. I looked around the house...
This phase was throwing me for a loop. As I stared at my words, each sentence demanded an illustration. After all, I am primarily an illustrator. There are 834 words in my story and approximately 75 sentences. A 75 page picture book was not going to fly. No - I wanted to break my text into 15 illustrations (14 two page spreads and one single page). I decided to ask Yuyi for some tips. Here are a few things she offered to help drive the process:
• Break the text so that it makes the reader want to turn the page to find out more.
• Think of balancing the amount of text on each page spread.
• Think of what makes a different scene every page.
• Think of the different scenes that will develop according to how you break the text.
I printed my text out and began penciling in possible page breaks. It was pretty straight forward, but I wanted a better feeling for it, so I studied some picture books to expose this process even more. I looked at page breaks, observing my feelings at the end of each page. Did I want to turn the page? Did I care? Again this was helpful, but I needed to be more a part of the process. I decided to take "unbroken", published picture book text and see if I could break it down myself. Since I already had the answers - finished picture books - I could then see how close I came.
At this point, I was almost buried in picture books. I chose
Stellaluna and
The Great Adventures of Wo Ti for my page break experiment because these books are more story-like and have a similar format to the one I am creating. I typed each story into my computer in a big block and printed them out. It was a fun challenge. My page breaks were very close.
Stellaluna threw me because I didn't realize it had more pages than a standard picture book until after I divided up the text. Even then I was almost right on. In areas where I missed the mark I was able to study the difference between my version and the published version. It was very enlightening.
This little exercise gave me the insight I needed to return to my own story. Once again I broke down my text while thinking about imagery and getting the reader to turn the page. When that was done I began my storyboard thumbnails.
While doing the thumbnails I discovered areas of emphasis that needed to shift. Sometimes an image seemed too similar to the image just before and I needed to focus attention on a different part of the text for that page. Sometimes I needed to move a line of text to the page before or the page after. All the while it was important to vary the point of view to make the images interesting. Creating a small storyboard is a great way to look at the overall relationships between illustrations. When things looked flat I thought about looking at the scene from a different angle - high, low, side, etc.
So, this time my feedback is going to take a little longer. Yuyi will be gone for a couple weeks. While she is away, I will be working on three other illustrations. I hope to post a finished one soon.
During my wait, I was also able to finish two more illustrations. My portfolio is lacking picture book scenes right now, so I created one of an outdoor market. As you can see here, there is an empty area in the upper right of this illustration. This was designed as a place for the story text to go (see below). The illustration can also be cropped and used without the empty area.
This market scene is a fairly quick study. The first step was to airbrush the entire background with the orange color. Over that I sketched in general shapes with Derwent Graphitint colored pencil and washed over them with plain water to blend. Next I went in with dry colored pencil to add some detail. I wanted this illustration to go quickly, so I kept it loose without a lot of detail.
The other thing my children's portfolio is lacking are black and white spot drawings. This type of drawing can fit many different situations from magazines to chapter books. For this one I started off with an overall gray wash and put the details in with graphite pencil.
Thanks for checking in. I'm working on my folktale illustration now and a new design for my portfolio site. I'm hoping that my next post will include the feedback for my last storyboard!
