Transcript: 3/15/12

TOPIC: Do you have a tried-and-true process for illustrating? Care to share? #kidlitart 3-15-12

Guest post: Mark G. Mitchell - Full Sized Dummy Sketches

Please welcome Mark Mitchell to KidLit Art. He is the author-illustrator of the Spur award winning book Raising La Bell. He illustrated for many years for the children's history
magazines Cobblestone and Appleseeds. He teaches an online course on illustrating children's books, Make Your Splashes – Make Your Marks! ( http://howtobeachildrensbookillustrator.com/NewCoursehome2/ ) Visit his blog http://HowToBeAChildrensBookIllustrator.WordPress.Com
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From Scribble to Sketch

Now comes a critical stage for your illustration – turning your tiny thumbnail idea into a full scale drawing.

Your thumbnail was the “scribble sketch” inside the tiny frame you drew – hardly more than one line that expressed the energy, impulse or attitude of your characters and the scene that sprang to life in your mind's eye.

In dashing down the line you were carving up your picture space, riffing your composition. You were finding ways to link gestures together into one abstract linear shape that caught the action of your scene. (The shape itself was a gesture.)

(For information on gesture drawing, see Kimon Nicolaides landmark book The Natural Way to Draw.)

Now you must expand that gesture to fill your larger picture space. You start by trying to recreate your thumbnail – the actual experience of that first gesture scribble, with its impetus, spontaneity and energy.





Now you have to recreate that gestural thumbnail on the larger surface, along with the impetus, the spontaneous energy of your first thumbnail scribble.

But you'll flesh out your gestural lines with solid contour silhouettes and details that will make your picture elements recognizable and believable.

So here it helps to bring in your visual references.

A Google image hunt and freeze-frames from YouTube videos come in handy here, as do the old standby's such as photocopies from other book illustrations, your own photos and sketches, family photo albums, school year books and other peoples' photos in Flickr, and other photo sharing sites.

Remember you're not “copying” anything – you're looking for visual information and inspiration here, edges and contours, silhouette shapes for all of the different puzzle pieces you must fit together for your illustrations. It can be one of the most creative stages of your illustration process, so have fun and get inspired.

Now with your raw material spread out around you (your thumbnail scribble and your references) turn to your larger sheet. It can be tracing paper or copy paper.

Start by drawing your page border, then your picture's border as you think it would appear on the page. Give this perimeter the same “aspect ratio” as your thumbnail sketch.

Consider how you'll fill the space with positive and negative shapes – and
if you want to include a text block in your composition.

Consider the “Golden Section” point on the horizontal of your picture, about 62 percent of the way across. It's often a good place for your illustration's center of interest – the dominant character(s) or main action.

Now with a light pencil mark, draw the horizon or eye level line – a big horizontal across your entire picture surface. It's not a bad idea to let the line run off your illustration in both directions.

Now you've determined the “point of view” that you and your viewer will “come at” this scene from.

You may not need linear perspective for every illustration. But always mark in your horizon or eye level line. It lets your viewer know if she's looking down or up at your scene or “straight on” it.

Keeping the eye level in mind allows you to fit all of your picture's “puzzle pieces” into the space more believably.

Benchmarks in place, you're ready to sketch, block out your scene in one uninterrupted passage.

Start by recreating your experience of each gesture (from your thumbnail). As you draw, feel the poses, actions and interactions inside you as you get them down, left to right.

Try to interlock these gestures, if you can. Link up the impulses, energy, movement and interaction – connect the gestures into one unified line if you can, the way you did your thumbnail.

Carve up the space swiftly and loosely, as you did on your thumbnail, working left to right – until you have it all down in light pencil.

Don't spend more than a minute on this. Don't worry about what it looks like.

You're done blocking in your composition with gesture. You've captured the “inner” lines, the “frozen music” (to borrow Frank Lloyd Wright's definition of architecture) of your story scene.

Erase back some of these gesture lines if you want.

Now comes the stage where you assemble your mosaic of details. Pull your reference all around you so that it's handy and viewable.-- and go right back to express more of your layout, moving left to right as before.

Work on one picture element at a time – consulting your references, articulate, delineate contours, edge details as you move from left to right.

Keep a loose, relaxed, playful attitude. It's the same mindset you had when you riffed out your gesture thumbnail. Enjoy and celebrate these forms as you develop them a little more in their dimensional fullness, adding surface accents and detail.

Keep more attention on your references than your drawing. Don't worry about what your drawing looks like yet.

Don't be distracted, keep moving from left to right. Cover all of the picture space, the whole of it, before you go back to fiddle with a part.


Stay loose. Don't overdraw – or shade your forms. You're not creating your final art here, but the outline (the blueprint) for your painting.

And you'll be done before you know it – with what many feel is the hardest stage of illustration.

#PBDummy Challenge Step 5

CREATE YOUR FULL-SIZE SKETCHES  

Note: This is a repeat of the Step 5 post from the first #PBDummy challenge, available along with the other posts from last year in the handy ebook co-host Wendy Martin put together. Enjoy!

We've arrived at tight pencils: creating (traditionally or digitally) the full-size sketches you'll use as templates for your finished art. We're devoting the biggest chunk of time in the #PBdummy schedule to this stage (eight weeks), because this is where you'll work out all your layout and composition issues, and because these will be the drawings that comprise your dummy--and sell the project.

No pressure!

By now you should be thoroughly familiar with your characters and have a sense of the flow and what needs to go on each spread. You may not have given much thought to the settings, yet. And you'll need to start grappling with the mechanics of the layout: text placement, margins, gutters and bleeds, oh, my!

So there's lots to cover, lots of drawing and second-guessing and general agonizing ahead. But lots of fun, too. You might find it helpful to browse your collection of favorite picture books, to remind yourself of the amazingly diverse art and design solutions used by successful illustrators.

Here are some other sources of inspiration:

Illustrating Children's Books: Creating Pictures for Publication, by Martin Salisbury

The Encyclopedia of Writing and Illustrating Children's Books: From creating characters to developing stories, a step-by-step guide to making magical picture books, by Desdemona McCannon, Sue Thornton and Yadzia Williams

Illustrating Children's Picture Books: Tutorials, Case Studies, Know-How, Inspiration, by Steve Withrow and Lesley Breen Withrow

Show and Tell: Exploring the Fine Art of Children's Book Illustration, by Dilys Evans

Artist to Artist: 23 Major Illustrators Talk to Children About Their Art, compiled by The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art

And three from the immortal Will Eisner:

Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative

Comics and Sequential Art

Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative

Transcript: 3/8/12

TOPIC: What is your dream job/client wish list? #kidlitart 3-8-12

Transcript: 3/1/12

TOPIC: What insights are you gaining from storyboarding your #PBDummy? #kidlitart 3-1-12

Guest post: Julian Hector on storyboard layout

I know that this is listed as step four, but storyboarding is something that I like to jump into as soon as possible. When creating a picture book, It's important not to compartmentalize the text from the illustrations, and the storyboard environment allows for both to happen at once.

Before you start, in order to draw your thumbnails proportionally, It's helpful to have a rough idea of your book's trim size. It's ok if you don't have the exact measurements, but at least decide on either a portrait or landscape orientation. (Note: If it's an illustration-only assignment, then it's common for the job to land on your desk with predetermined dimensions.)

Try not to get stuck on your less sure, 'in between' scenes:
Most of the time, we aren't lucky enough to have our books floating in our heads, fully formed, but we usually have a good grasp of the key scenes - jot those scenes down and worry about the others later. In my book, The Gentleman Bug, I knew exactly how I wanted the ending to look, but I was less sure about the rest, so I developed it from back to front.

Digitizing the storyboard process can save a lot of time:
Adobe Illustrator's multi art-board tool is amazing for this. With it, you can quickly arrange 32 squares and begin placing your text and illustrations, all while having the ability to zoom in and out, and print your roughs at actual size.

Abstract your scenes:
This is helpful at almost every stage of your picture book's development. Whether you're just starting to arrange the text and illustrations, or you're farther along, simple shapes are a great way to asses the flow of your book.

This is an example from The Little Matador, where I used basic shapes to quickly capture the placement of the main characters. Doing this, makes the pacing very clear, and It's great for catching problems of scale - like having too many back-to-back close-ups of your main character, or not enough. Again, working digitally is a time-saver here.

Think of your thumbnail storyboards as an information map:
Use arrows to connect a cause on one page with it's effect on another, highlight the climax pages in bold red, do whatever it takes to help get a deep understanding of what needs to happen in order to make your picture book work.

Finally, try not to get too precious about anything. Stay messy, avoid attachment, and approach your thumbnail storyboards with the knowledge that anything you fall in love with could be axed later on. :)

Bio:
Julian Hector is one of the youngest author/illustrators working in children’s publishing today. Five years ago, he was plucked out of college by an editor at Disney-Hyperion, and he’s been writing and illustrating children’s book ever since. His most recent book is C.R. Mudgeon, written by Leslie Muir, and you can visit his website here: www.Julianhector.com.

#PBDummy Challenge Step 4

STORYBOARD TEXT AND ART

The next two weeks will be devoted to tiny sketches of your proposed layouts.

This is an important step. The purpose of the storyboard is to view the entire sequence of pages at once in order to judge the flow. That's why we call them thumbnail storyboards--ideally, they should fit on one page. You can see at a glance how the scenes are distributed, the balance of spreads vs. single pages, the movement of the action, and how the focus shifts from one scene to the next.

You will notice passages where there's not much happening--no real need for a change of scene . . . or passages where too much is crowded into one scene. You will probably need to go back and adjust your manuscript--that's the point of this stage: seeing how the text and art play off each other.

Now is a good time to brush up on the basics of how a (printed) picture book is put together. One of the best breakdowns is provided by our friend Tara Lazar in this popular post. And here is a storyboard tutorial from an acknowledged master, Uri Shulevitz.

Once you understand the space you have to work with, you can create your own template, scaled down proportionately from the finished page size you have chosen.

Start simply: a circle to indicate action contained on one page and an arrow to show action continuing across the spread. Maybe jot notes to yourself: bird's eye view, character close-up, etc. Gradually refine these scribbles and notes until even someone who doesn't know the story is able to "read" the action.

I don't know about you, but this is the stage when it hits me: I'm working on a BOOK, by golly!

Isn't that exciting?!?