Cory and the 7th Story
I have another picture book in the works that I am super excited about! I have been working on it for about three months now fleshing out the characters, environment, and flat plan. I thought you might like to see a few things I have created. These are all just sketches and ideas, but if you are like me, that's the art that I love to see:)
Logos and characters and environment oh my!
When I begin a picture book project I need to think through some of the building blocks of what will become the picture book. This requires research and studies and lots of little messy drawings. But if I take the time to think through this stuff up front, the rest of the picture book process goes much more smoothly.
Visual Logos:
Imagery, such as small vignettes that act as visual logos is a nice way for me to think about the essence of the story, and they become good little pieces of art to represent the project. I created two such pieces of art and above is the one I like the most. It's just a pen drawing on layout bond with prisma color marker at this point. I love prima color marker because you can lay down color quickly and get a sense of what final art might look like. But at the same time I often find the colors are too saturated. I guess I haven't figured out the best way to work with them yet, but I keep trying:) I will eventually paint it in oil
Characters:
Characters of the story is the next thing I need to think about. I try to push myself to think about variety of shape and size (something I learned while at the Academy). I had a good friend of mine tell me that you should be able to recognize a character by it's shadow. Meaning their shape is so distinctive that you would know if anywhere! I think that is a great way of thinking about it! I haven't perfected that yet, but I do keep that in mind as I develop my characters. Below is the character line up I created. There are a lot of characters! I love the variety of animals I got to work with and imagining their environment was even more fun!
Environment:
The next thing I had to think of was the environment where these little guys live. I focused in on these words from the manuscript....Cory lived in the old village, along the clear stream, near the edge of the deep forest, within the broad meadow. I created a little painting of what this might look like, you can see it below.
Then I had to come up with all of the houses that these animals would live in. That was even more fun! I drive through a small ski village on my way to work. As I was driving through I noticed all these cozy little homes that people rent out during the ski season. They made for the best visual reference for the homes I imagined my characters living in. One day on my way to work, I took time out to stop and walk through the village. I brought my camera and took all kinds of photo reference of the homes to give me ideas to work with. Then I went back to my drawing table and come up with houses for each of my characters. You can see a sample of them below.
