Next steps...

Now I have finished my storyboard I will focus my time on media and creating a finished look for my pages. I will experiment further with colour combinations and how much collage to use in my images, and when this is finalised I can start to create my final pages. I am fairly sure that the style I want to create my book with is mixing collage with ink or paint, however I want to experiment to see how much of the image can be collage without overwhelming it. I also want to try out tubes of watercolour paint for the background rather than the pan watercolours I currently use to see if a bolder clearer colour is more effective.

I need to finalise the text for my book, and break it up into which bits will fit onto which pages.  At the moment I have a story planned out, but I haven't decided on the final wording of the text, whether to keep it short or complicated, or how exactly it will be split between the pages. These are all things I need to decide upon next. 
I also need to design the text for my book, both the font and the positioning on the page, which will also affect the layout of the pages. I don't want my text to simply go at the bottom or side of the page, so I want to experiment with ways of incorporating the text into the image.

I will start looking at different ways in which to make my book. I want to make a handmade version of my book, so I will need to research and experiment with different techniques of book binding. I also want to have a few copies made proffessionally, so I will need to look at print companies to order from.


I plan to spend the next few weeks experimenting with these things to make my final design clear and finished before looking into producing the final book.

Story Board and Mock Book

At this stage in my project I wanted to start to make the storyline and ideas for page layouts more certain so I could start to develop the style and composition of the book. I chose to use a 32 page, A4 portrait format, as most of my sketches had been done in an A3 landscape sketchbook so would fit nicely into this format.

To fit into the 32 page book I had to decide on which things I was going to make my little girl imagine herself as. I decided to keep the images in a pair of "before" and "after" images like my initial sketches had been, and I also had to take into account how many pages would be taken up by the cover, beginning and end. This left me with 10 pages, which I split into 5 pairs.
The pages I chose in the end were:

• a leaf
• a cat
• a flower
• the moon
• a giant

I now had to put these ideas into an order that a story would fit around. When thinking of these ideas I had also been thinking about the reasons that a child would want to become them. What is so great about being a cat that a child would want to become one? Why would a child want to become a leaf? What use would a child have from becoming a giant? Children don't want to become these things for no reason, so I began to think about what attributes these things have that a child would want.

I decided upon a reason for each of the objects that the child wanted to be.

The reasons were:

• a leaf - to fly in the wind/fall from the tree
• a cat - to go exploring/go on adventures/crawl around everywhere
• a flower - so butterflies would land on me/would smell nice
• the moon - stay up all night/live with the stars
• a giant - to reach everything/to be taller than my older brother

I sketched these ideas out in my book as small, rough thumbnails to make sure the order was right, then I started to take each idea and expand on it to get a rough composition for each page.

Once I had completed my storyboard in my sketchbook, I decided to create a basic mock book to get a better idea of how my drawings look together, and also to see the effect the fold down the middle of the page would have on the composition. I just used basic sketches to show the layout of each page.

Now the storyboard and layouts of each page are finalised I will spend time creating images that are more finished and final. I will use the images from my storyboard in my experiments and eventually create my final images using them.

Colour Combinations

To get a better idea of the colours that would work well in my book I painted lots of swatches of colour and cut them out so that I could compare various combinations.

Being able to select colours from these will help me try out new colour combinations, and also allow me to limit the amount of colours I use by being able to easily see which combinations would create the effect I want for each page.

Paint and Collage

I decided to experiment with the different levels of collage and paint in my work. Originally I had planned to just collage the characters and keep the background painted, however I wanted to find out how effective using collage in small areas of the background was. For another project I had been doing this year I collaged the main focus of the page and used a plain painted background, however although this works with a very simple background I didn't think this would be effective for a page with scenery behind the character.

I started with a sketch I had used in my storyboard of my character standing amongst some flowers. This was a fairly simple composition to experiment with, as the flowers were the only things in the background.

I collaged the figure, and added in small amounts of collage in the background such as a few of the flowers or some of the plant stems. I like this effect and think I will carry on working in this way, however I need to adjust the colours of this image so that the figure is the main focus and the viewer is not distracted by the bright colours of the flowers. I also need to neaten up the painted parts of the image, as the paint has run slightly in certain areas.