Project Proposal

For my FMP, I’m going to look into Illustrating a book for children.
In my Authorship 2 project last year I started an idea for a children’s book about the bizarre things children dream of being when they grow up. I want to continue this work this year, but I also want to look into illustrating narratives, including ones involving anthropomorphism.
My project from last year had looked at the strange things children imagine themselves being, but I hadn't looked at ways of turning this into a book format or a narrative, so this would be something I would be interested in looking at. 

I want to make a picture book aimed at children between the ages of about 3 and 6. At this stage the focus of the book is very much on the images. I need to make my book interesting enough to entertain both children and parents, as it is the parents who will be buying the book and reading it to their children.

I want to look into anthropomorphism to start with. Children have always been fascinated by animals, hence the great number of books and films where animals are personified and made into the main characters. I have made basic wordless narratives using animals as characters, but I have never written a whole story including them so I think that I would like to experiment with this.

I want to experiment with new techniques in this project, however I do want to particularly focus on paint and collage as I have worked with these before and like the textures and bright colours you can achieve with them. 

I would like to try combining painting and collage, as although I have successfully used both techniques individually I am interested to see how the two materials would work together. 

To start with I will look at drawing a range of animals, and then look at which are most effective. Once I have done this I will look into turning some of these into characters, and from these drawings I can then start to write a short narrative.

I will also start to look at books already on the market, and the techniques other children's illustrators have used in the past and are currently using.

This blog will track my progress throughout this project.