Project: Child’s Book Spread

Kind of ironic that a lot of the people that do Illustration Friday are illustrators for children’s books.

Project
Do a two-page spread of a children’s book. 6″ height x 16″ width, use guides. The text will be a story of the student’s own or a nursery rhyme. The art will be any and all of the following: scratchboard effect, scribble effect, compound, text wrap, brushes, perspective (free transform tool).

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Research
Since research was a big one on this one, I figured I’d make it its own section. I do a little research for every project but I really had no idea what a children’s book was like and wanted to do well considering the last project wasn’t my best.

I looked at various page layouts and through the four children books that I had from my own childhood. Two were too “texty” and I wanted to have a spread that was mostly image.

In my research, I read that “board books” are usually about simple everyday things like “trucks, cars, farm animals, taking a bath, washing the car, playing with toys.” And that the words match the art. This came in handy when I was coming up with the right text.

I kept having this image in my head of a Chinese art-style dragon with its bold colors and nice chunks that could be easily duplicated in Illustrator. But when I mentally put the “scribble effect” on it, it was ruined.

I then looked at Adobe’s tutorial and Studio Mimesis Illustrator CS Scribble tutorial (after translating it, of course). Right before class, I saw my cat watching a cardinal outside and the story hit me. I took some quick digital pictures of him and then ran to class.

Method: Scribble/Layout
Illustrator CS at school so no tablet! Freehanded the birds, which is obvious now that I have seen a cardinal recently.

Scribble was done exactly like Adobe’s tutorial. It made it so much easier (and I think consistent) with the scribble as a “graphic style.” I thought long and hard about font choice and went with Galliard since it followed the research and seemed to “fit.”

The cloud was giving me problems. I wanted it to be under the border, but I had the sky as a box and the grass as the bigger box around that. And that outside box (grass) had the border on it. Well, that was silly. I took off the border and then put another box around it all, with no fill, and put the border on that. Then the cloud just tucked up under there.

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As you can see, I started with the cat paw breaking the frame. I knew from the start, that I wanted to do that. But the second page is very static… dead. Time to interrupt some lines over there, too! I also put a text-wrap around the initial letter since it was required.

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I’ve put on the scribble. This is when available memory dwindled to zero on the Mac. To make little tweaks (like the cat wasn’t exactly on the border), I turned on outline view so that the scribble wouldn’t cause annoying slowness. Then I switched back to preview and back again if I needed to tweak some more.

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I change the text for the final because it was too abstract. I wanted some red down in the text. I was going for that whole “lead the eye thing” with the red. But it was too much red. So, the teacher had a great idea about the divide tool.

Method: Divide Pathfinder

Draw a shape and type a letter.

To make a compound, you select the letter and convert it to outlines by Type -> Create Outlines. You then select it and the shape, and Object -> Compound Path -> Make. Problem with this was that it was too much black and white or red and white or red and black. I wanted to break it up some.

Undo the compound with control-Z. Now Window -> Pathfinder (if it’s not up already), make sure the shape and letter (which is still in outline), are selected and click the divide pathfinder. With the select tool with the black arrow and the plus, select the section you want to color differently.

I picked the bird to stay black and the curve of the “B” that is outside of the shape to be red, and the “B” inside to be white. I really like how there’s an echo of a bird in flight (otherwise known as “m” bird), in the red on the letter.

And then..
The critique was just last night, though the rest of this post has been written for quite some time. There was definitely a variety of student work from loose scribble to scratchboard effect, colorful to not, poetic to “spell check is your friend.” She stressed the two pages should be unified, use the scribble effect, compound, text wrap. The unification was by color or style. There were a few that did a spread with no division (like my pages), but had text or an important element in the gutter. That can cause problems depending on how the book is put together.

The usual design elements were talked about like hierarchy and contrast. The value of the color and text clashed a few times so that the text was difficult to read. And there were also clashes in what was supporting and which was most important in the hierarchy.

The feedback on my design was: elegant and she wanted to turn the page. She also asked for the original to show next year’s class an example of the project. Very flattering. Too bad I didn’t have warning or I would have cleaned up my layers (name/organize) a little.

This was one of the most fun projects in the class so far. Which is good since the project after this is the poster/paper about a teacher-given typography topic.