Brainstorms for ideas
Year planning:
Project Planning - My Gantt chart:
Evaluation
My original concept was to write and illustrate a whole book, to be printed out as a book physically. My book was not completed properly to be able to print it out, much to my annoyance. I still plan to print it out and give a copy to my daughters school to read to her class. I did achieve a completed book yes, just not to my high standards. I have lots of ideas where to improve the book so I consider this my first draft.
I am happy with the style that I settled on, with the brush choice, how the sea creatures look, and my progress so far on the characters. I am pleased with the story I came up with and think it could do well. I like the direction the book is heading, it just has a long way to go yet.
What I learnt
I learnt a lot from this project, I had never attempted to write a story and create whole scenes for a book before. I had a clear idea in my head but I had to learn how to achieve this. I spent a lot of time figuring out my character design, looking at other illustrators and deciding how I wanted my characters to look. I considered using the watercolour style I love and have perfected but I wanted to push myself to learn another style, because it suited the book better and I want to learn as much as I can about book illustration.
I need to decide on some cohesive texture to add to the characters, such as mermaid scales. I spent a lot of time imitating other illustrators designs to understand how they did theirs, to help inform how I wanted my characters to look.
I needed to figure out how to create a look of depth for the sea, because just using blue as a flat colour looked terrible. I managed to make it look ok but I feel I can work on this much more.
I practiced shadows and highlights a lot because I don’t feel I have perfected this yet, but I made a big improvement.
I watched a lot of Skillshare and YouTube videos to help me understand children’s book illustration, so this helped me to learn a lot about out to set up the scenes of the book. This information was invaluable to me as someone that has done it before.
Because of external stress as well as illness I ran out of time for making sure each character was different, with shading and highlights. I need to finish these characters to a much higher standard.
What would I do differently?
I plan to redo every scene but in the style that Carlianne Creates did sketching the whole scene as one before colouring it, to make it look more cohesive, rather than creating each element separately as I did and copying it into the book file. I also want to use a specific colour palette that I can refer to throughout the project.
I am going to continue working on the book until I am happy with it, and then I will be send a small copy to publishers to try and get it published. I may also self publish with Amazon kindle self publishing. This project was a lot bigger than I expected it to be, and will take time, but I have time to work on it over the summer and am determined to get it published eventually. Excuses the book is not finished I didn’t want to create a cover yet, because I feel this is that last step before printing so that it matches the story.
Overall, I have completed what I set out to do, create a magical story that also teaches children about the ecological environmental issues under the sea, how we as humans can affect it. It is a story that I would be happy to read to my own daughter and her friends, to create more eco conscious human beings as they grow up.
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