Project 5 Process Documentation
Since I am an art student, I wanted to do a project that incorporated my art skills into the design. For my final project, I decided to create an illustrated book based on the Chinese poem, Ballad of Mulan. I hoped to create a picture book — not necessarily for children — that was aesthetically pleasing and easy to read.
I was interested in creating something like the image below. A simple, illustrated book with illustrations that would take up an entire spread each.
I first took the translated version of the poem, found on WikiSource, and divided the poem up into segments based on what made the most sense to illustrate. Although the recommended length of the book was 12 or 16 pages, the best I could do was divide the book up into 20 pages.
I pretty much decided on the final arrangement of the text very early on in the project. The next thing to do were the 9 color spreads, and the front and back cover. I did a few initial concept sketches of what I wanted Mulan to look like. I did not want her to be too reminiscent of the Disney version, so I looked up different types of Chinese armor and experimented with those.
For the interim crit, I came with two spreads, the first and the last.
I had added text boxes because I had not initially taken into consideration that I would have to compose my drawings around the text. Therefore, as a last-ditch effort to have something presentable in critique, I added these temporary ugly text boxes for legibility. The general consensus was that the text could be smaller and the illustrations and text should be arranged more carefully with each other.
For the rest of my illustrations, I blocked them out first. I was careful to create my compositions so that there would be space for the text.
During a desk crit, I was told that the font I used was too plain and basic. It was, admittedly, Minion Pro, which was the default font in InDesign. I initially used it because I thought a clean, serif font would fit the storybook theme well, but I also agreed that it was still very plain and generic. So I chose a new font, Eskapade Fraktur, which I found online. The script-like print perfectly conveyed the old-fashioned storybook feeling I wanted.
The rest of my time was just spent coloring. I worked to make sure that, while the color palette for each illustration was different, that they still didn’t clash too much from page-to-page, so that the book still felt like a coherent whole.
For my cover, I drew two different variants that captured the dichotomy of Mulan’s character: her soldier side, and her traditional Chinese lady side. I decided that they would function as a front and back cover.
The final product looks like this:
Final thoughts:
I had a lot of fun doing this piece. I had illustrated a book before, but not this extensively or with this much care. I learned a lot of lessons when it came to book layout and composition. I learned that I had to create my illustrations with the layout of the page in mind, so that nothing important fell on the middle crease, or was overlapped by text. If I were to create another zine like this, I would definitely take such things into greater consideration so that the art would flow smoothly around the words.
