Reflection of Picture Book Project

Francesca Hannah Veal Project Four, Reflection , , , ,

As I have come to the end of my project I have begun to reflect on the work I have produced, what I like about my designs and what I wish I could have improved/thought about more.

I think the book Is well designed to aim for my target demographic audience of three to seven year old’s, with the painted style of the designs, rough brush and pencil strokes and simple designs that are easy to follow.

One aspect I wish I could have worked harder on/spent more time researching and creating would be my font design of my book. The font does hold connotations of more “old, classic” children’s books such as The Peter Rabbit books and the old Winnie The Pooh books which was my intention. However, thinking back I wish I spent more time looking at more modern and contemporary picture books and the fonts they use. If I had more time I could have loved to have created my own font for the book, with a handwritten style.

Character Development 3I am glad when I designed my individual characters that I made sure each figure had a different aspect to their image to identify them. To specify which gender the characters were this was as easy as adding eyelashes onto the female bees which immediately made it obvious. I feel this will make it easier for my audience to follow the storyline with there being so many characters.

Another amendment I would have made if I could re-design the book, is having block colours as the background. I found it very hard to make it obvious the characters were in a scene but still have a white background. For example: Pages 3, 7 and 8 below, I tried to keep the background white to keep consistency of the design throughout. Therefore I used faded brush tools to create the background of the scene central of the page. Looking back, I wish I didn’t do this and used block colours for my background of each scene – I just found this hard to do with all the  small items that needed to be seen in order for the storyline to make sense.

 

I am very glad I chose line painting to create my designs. I found it enjoyable to create my characters and images. To improve on these however I wish I researched more into how to create line paintings and watch YouTube tutorials, so I could learn some new skills and my work would look better. I am frustrated at myself that I did not do this because it was my intention to do this when I started the project, however I can only learn from my mistakes and I may practice my line painting and explore tutorials online in the future.

If I had finished my designs with enough time, I would have loved to have asked children, and parents with children to read my book and receive feedback on the designs and storyline of the book. Having feedback from my target demographic audience would have enabled me to have a look at my finished project and make any adjustments that could have made a big difference in appealing to my audience.

I hope my designs and storyline successfully get across the message of the book. I’m glad I chose the animal Bee to transfer this message has the Bee are known and hold connotations of teamwork and hard work, which will hopefully help get my message across – that individual skills and talents are very important but they are most important when working in part of a team, and it is crucial that all team members work together.

 

Front and Back Cover designs

Francesca Hannah Veal Development, Experiments, Project Four , , , , , , , , ,

This is the first front cover I created, blocking out my title and main character positions.

I hated it.

Front Cover Devel 4

 

I wanted my title to be bigger, more obvious and more interesting, so I came up with this:

front cover update

 

Much better! However I wanted it to appear so that the Bee was leaning on the text and that is why it is slanted, so I altered my little character a little.

front cover update 2

 

My next thought was adding colour so I experimented with a few:

My favourite was the blue colour, however I still wasn’t thrilled with the design but I had hit a block and couldn’t think of any genius ideas. I decided to move on to my back cover whilst I think.

back cov

My back cover design came straight to me and I loved it. Not what I had planned in my storyboard but much better. The small details of the bees does not take the distraction away from the synopsis in the centre.

I then decided the small bees could be a theme and run on my front and back cover, which ultimately will be adding detail to my front cover and not look like too much.

font cov

 

I think I still need to spend some time playing around with the angles and positions of the bees however this design is much better than my original.

Photoshop Developments

Francesca Hannah Veal Development, Project Four , , ,

In my storyline I have a wooden table included in which the whole family of bees will sit round. Not being particularly amazing at drawing I searched Google on a tutorial on drawing a table, as I wanted to give it a go myself and not just use one I found online.

I found this webpage on HubPages website; http://hubpages.com/art/How-to-draw-a-table

I provides a step by step  instruction on how to draw a table, in which I followed.

My finished drawing looked like this once scanned onto my laptop:

table

I then began editing it in Photoshop. Removing the background and adding colour using the paint brush tool and multiple layers.

h

 

Character Development

Francesca Hannah Veal Development, Experiments, Project Four , , ,

Before I continued with the rest of my book I completed the designs of my bee characters, using the sketches I uploaded and Photoshop. I have only worked on the one front pose for each character, and I want to experiment on using just this pose to start with, and then adding in other poses later on.

 

I started by removing the sketch and placing into a new blank canvas, removing the white and duplicating the sketch to make the other half of the bee.Character Development

Secondly I went over the outline with a small black paintbrush to make the outline of the bees more visible. And then began colouring the characters in.

Character Development 2

I planned to use my sketch of the female bee for the character “Sally” however once edited the character looked more appropriate for the “Mother” character and I was short of a “Sally” and “Holly” bee. Using segments of different characters and editing them together, I was able to create the two new characters and distinguishing them somehow from the rest.

Character Development 3

My focus in creating these characters was to make an obvious difference in look between each of them, so it would be easy for my younger target audience to distinguish between the characters and be able to follow the storyline.