Sneak peak of a new project I'm working on!

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.

  

Now for the fun part....

See if you can guess which animal lives in which house!

I hope you enjoyed learning about Cory and the 7th Story.  I will have more to post about it in the coming months as I work through the pages and introduce you to my wonderful authors!  You are going to love this story!!!!

TTFN