Visual Book Process Documentation
Initial Idea and Inspiration
When the word visual book is mentioned, I instantly remembered the history books that my mother used to read for me when I go to bed. The textual content is usually accompanied by illustrations of a battle scene. Therefore, for my project, I wanted to create a book of paintings that corresponding to a story. Naturally, I wanted to create such a book for a traditional Chinese story, because of my heritage. One potential problem that I ran into could be the audience. Since not audience read mandarin, I need to find a way so that people could still understand the meaning of the story.
Story Selection
After determining the objective of my book, I searched through several traditional Chinese myths and finally settled on an excerpt from Classics of the Mountains and Seas, a masterpiece of geological myth stories. I chose the piece The Tale of Jingwei because I was fascinated by the transformation of the character and her persistence to fill the ocean. Also, the variety of settings and characters (i.e. mountains, ocean, rogue wave, birds) challenges me to create a different set of spreads that each has unique elements.
Design Choice
Since the story is of traditional Chinese scripts, it only makes sense to create all elements in Chinese painting way. Each illustration should have part of the story written in brush calligraphy, accompanied by a painting that fits the meaning of the text.
Research
I drew a lot of inspiration from this series of paintings. The style of the illustration is very similar to that of traditional Chinese ink painting. The background the author used also mimics the material of the paper of ink painting. However, I did not like how the text and the illustration is so separated. Also, the fact that the text is in English took something away from the paintings.
I also examined this series of visual books spreads about Japanese myth. Comparing to the previous example, the illustration is more interactive with the text. Also, the text is in Japanese, which makes the whole piece more consistent. However, my problem with it is that the text is a little too chaotic.
Step 1: Pseudo Painting Creation
Taking lessons from the 2 examples, I started with my first round of creation. Since I do not actually know how to create ink art painting, I followed a YouTube tutorial to change a picture to the similar art style that I am looking for (hence the name Pseudo Painting). In the following section, I will briefly go over the creation of 1–2 spreads. The technique might vary a little but can be generalized by the this abstraction.
- Create a canvas that looks like paper:
2. Import a source image that we are transforming:
3. Apply smart blue, angled stroke, and water color filter:
4. Apply Layer mask and paint over with brush tool:
Step 2: Typeface Creation
Since I do not have the tool to create traditional typeface (cannot find them in illustrator either), I was fortunate to find an online tool that generates the these writings. In the following steps, I will show how the textual content is created on each page. Although most page is quite straightforward, there were delicate edge cases that I must handle.
- Trace out downloaded characters in illustrator
2. Rearrange the texts in vertical order (traditional Chinese textbooks are all written vertically, read from right to left)
3. Add all of them to the painting
Step 2b. Manual Typeface Creation
In this case, I will show how some texts are created. Since not all character could be generated from the online calligraphy online generator, I needed to manually piece together certain parts of different characters, to “spell out” the one that I need. The following series of images demonstrate this process.
On spread 7, you can find this character:
This character is in fact manually rearranged, as the generator actually fails to create the character of this desired typeface
- Determine the parts need to create the character. There are 3 parts of this character, the left, the right top, and right bottom. Then, we need to find the sources of these parts in other characters. The follow characters contain the parts needed:
2. Separate out these parts in illustrator
3. Rearrange to the structure that we desire
4. Readjust the proportion of the parts so that the character does not look awkward (make left side bigger and right side smaller and shorter)
Step 3 Photograph Manipulation
Although most of the picture could be found online, some specialized photograph remains missed. Therefore, I had to find volunteer to pose for certain spreads. For example, for spread 5, where our protagonist drowned, I wanted to create a feeling that she is consumed by the ocean. After having the basic layout, I arrive at this stage:
The white central spot is where the Nuwa should be. I was able to find a volunteer to pose for the picture to simulate drowning. The source image is attached below:
I traced out the outline of the pose, and applied the similar filter-layer-mask trick, and the end result is this:
Feedback and Revision I
At this point, I have completed most of my spreads. The 2 most common feed back I have received is that: 1) The painting on each page is too big and the text becomes very hard to read. 2) As there lacks English translation, most audience are left confused.
I thought the first problem was easier to handle, however, the second one is more difficult to address as the audience of this book is not intended for non-Chinese readers. As an attempt to address this problem, I drafted a copy containing English translation.
Although the allows the readers, Chinese and non-Chinese readers alike, to understand the content of the book, I found it disturbing to have 2 languages of texts with drastically different typeface. I think it breaks the consistency of the content. As a result, I let go of this idea and decided to create a cover page and a catalog page where each part of the story is translated and mapped to the corresponding page. This way, I can preserve the consistency of the book.
To summarize, I created the following revision plan:
- Shrink the size of demonstration
- Increase the size of text
- properly arrange the painting and the text
I started implementing the plan.
For each painting, I first shrink the size of the demonstration so that it does not take up the whole page. To save your time, I am only showing Spread 4 as an example.
Feedback and Revision II
After showing these changes to Julia and Kaylee, they suggested that I implement a concrete grid system so that the consistency becomes stronger. To respond to this suggestion, I altered the size and position of each element, using the grid system from photoshop.
Other minor changes include changing the texture of the canvas as Kaylee mentioned that the previous canvas feels “cheap” because it is populated with repeated pattern. The newer background resembles the quality of paper more. After making these changes to all illustrations, I decided to conclude with the visual aspect of the book. The result is as follows:
Cover Page
With the conclusion of the heaviest part of the book, I am free to do create a cover page that work nicely with the rest of the book to maintain consistency. To start, I chose the same paper-like background.
Since the story is an excerpt from Classics of the Mountain and Seas, Section Classics of the Mountains: North, it is appropriate to include these information before the actual title. After adding these pre-titles:
In imperial periods of China, the authorship of a book is identified with a specialized stamp that says “xxx prints”. Since a theme of this visual book is to celebrate these traditions, I decided to spend time creating such a stamp.
First, I obtained my name in these stamp characters:
Then rearrange them into a square and add filters.
Finally, adding this and the title of the story to the cover page:
Catalog Page
To solve the problem that most people do not understand mandarin, I decided to have a catalog page to include the translations and map them to each painting. This is rather simple to do, except that I needed to make sure the spacing are appropriate. Using the grid system, I spaced out 5 rows of squares between each translation of part of the stories. I also chose a typeface that somewhat resembles the “ancient” feeling of the book. Although it is harder to read, it resembles the writing of the Bilbo Baggins in the Hobbit Movie. The result is as follows:
Epilogue
During the final stages of desk critique, Kaylee mentioned to me that I should think about having an epilogue as a courtesy of books. It naturally came to me to write about the Classics of Mountains and Seas. Hence, I included a small paragraph about what the book entails and when it was created.
Then, I realized that having words like “Han Dynasty”, “Warring States” can be very confusing to people who do not know Chinese history. Instead of providing a clear guideline about when the book was written, this paragraph actually confused people more. To solve this problem, I decided to add a timeline that clarifies this problem. As the readers read through the paragraph, they will have the timeline at the bottom of the page to help them understand the chronological order of the book. The end result is as follows:
