Assignment 5: Visual Book (05.10.19)
“To delight a child, to add a new joy to the crowded miracles of childhood, is no less worth doing than to leave a Sistine Chapel to astound a somewhat bored procession of tourists; or to have written a classic that sells by the thousands and is possessed unread by all save an infinitesimal percentage of its owners. It is, then, not an ignoble thing to do one’s very best to give our coming rulers — children — a taste of the Kingdom of Art.” — Gleeson White
Objective: create a book with text and original imagery “that matches and enhances the content”
Before I started brainstorming, I had a vague idea of the content and layout I wanted. I knew I wanted to write about something I was passionate about, something that I connected to. I thought about dance, like what I did for my posters. But I found that I was much more inspired by the art and stories of my own culture. I wanted to explore Indian culture in a new way, one that would maybe help others explore it as well.
I settled on telling a story about a Hindu myth I had heard and read about as a child. Hindu myths and tales of ancient India filled my childhood in the form of comics and stories told to me by my family. I wanted to draw inspiration from the intricacies of Indian art to evoke feelings of wonder and nostalgia often present in children’s books. I thought about emphasizing the background over the human figures to create a “larger-than-life” atmosphere.
My inspiration came from a mix of Indian art and children’s books. I really liked the style of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. I loved the book both as a child and years later as a young adult reading it to my younger brother. Both times, the book evoked feelings of wonder and adventure, a little scarier when I was younger, a little sadder when I was older. I knew that as a children’s book, the layout had to emphasize visuals and feature little text per page. However, the text still had to be readable. I liked the idea of floating text and image boxes that balanced each other on each page. I also explored the idea of having images bleed out of each box.
After sketching out the entire book, I got a much better idea about what types of visuals I wanted, as well as the feasibility of actually illustrating the book. I sketched various figure poses and backgrounds, both on paper and on Illustrator.
Pretty quickly, I realized that I could not feasibly illustrate a whole children’s book in the typical watercolor or intricate styles that I had envisioned in my head and seen in many examples. I decided to use a lot of reference images to trace and tweak to fit my content. I was afraid that the illustrations would not look consistent across pages because I was using many different reference images, but I corrected for this by using the same simple color palette across the entire book and using similar techniques on each page in terms of shading, background coloring, etc.
I was pretty happy with my illustrations, even though they took a very long time to make.
Final Product
Reflection
Unfortunately, I had a number of printing issues the day the assignment was due, so I was unable to resize and print the book with either the dimensions I wanted or the scale that I wanted. Everything ended up being about 75% of the size I originally intended, and that made the visuals and text harder to decipher. Still, I was happy with the content. I love the original story, and I truly did my best to represent it in a way that does the myth justice, both in its content and its meaning to me. If I could do anything differently, I would leave myself more time for tweaking visuals and dealing with last minute issues lol. Also, I’m not sure if I would have preferred this, but next time I would like to create content that isn’t so demanding in labor as this book was in terms of creating the visuals. I would have liked to explore the more creative side of making a book, both in its content and the physical book itself.
