Production Report 4-6

This is a big one! There's been a lot of pre-production going on for the book and we're finally working on the final designs.

Writing and Outside Opinions

The biggest hurdle for me has been the writing for the book. I was stuck on it for a long time rearranging things and making changes. It got to the point where I couldn't tell if the story made sense anymore. Luckily, I have a great friend who happens to be a really amazing writer AND a childhood psychologist! We talked for two hours and she really helped me get an outside opinion.

I made a bunch of notes on pacing, story and specific lines I wasn't happy with. Here are a couple of screenshots of that meeting!

I continued to work on the book but kept getting stuck on compositions for the pages. I wanted to have some fun transitions and some overall unique layouts. I also kept working on the first page, trying different variations of compositions...

Those are just two examples but it just wasn't clicking. I decided to stop planning and just start finalizing the pages I was 100% on. Here was the first page I started working on compared to the recent draft of it.

Character Design

Child

I haven't changed the main child's design much since the start of the book. One of my fondest memories as a kid was the freedom of my usual outfit consisting huge baggy t-shirt and shorts.

I just downloaded some old family videos onto my computer so enjoy these screenshots for proof.😁

So I had my character wear the same thing. I also am still learning anatomy and having baggy clothing helps shield some of that!

Next, I'm white and I knew I wanted my character not to be. I had multiple references for skin tone to make sure I didn't use an unnatural color. Although, my style does tend to be a little saturated and over the top so just know I at least started with a realistic skin color before messing with the hue!

Moving on, I continued to experiment with different styles for the art in general, but especially for the characters. Here is a timeline of style variations from the beginning.

Overall, I wanted everything in the book to be as un-detailed as possible story wise. I wanted every child that could relate to it to be able to without things like family status/background/amount of money, where they live or who their friends are etc. to make the book not relatable to them. That is why I kept many things broad story wise, which honestly was a huge reason why it was a lot harder to write. Along these lines, I decided to make an androgenous looking child, that way gender wasn't something that could get in the way either.

I landed on a cartoon style with some small details. Part of that style was deciding what brush stroke to use; that would heavily impact the tone of the book. I made a draft to see what brush fit the character design the best. It's hard to tell the brushes are even different here, but it helped a lot moving forward. I decided to use the "6B pencil" (second example) brush on Procreate along with "dry ink" (3rd example) for some details.

After deciding those general parameters, there was a lot of composition and idea drafting I used them for. Although I was finally able to start finalizing the pages and needed assets so my art was consistent through each page (and to make things quicker).

I knew that the child's body was in all sorts of positions throughout the story, so I almost didn't see a reason to draw an asset for that. Although when looking up example of "child cartoon legs" to figure out what style to use, I found this picture of a boy that fit the body style I was using. For general references I began just using him(I have been adding references when I've needed them, so this page has continued to be filled out)!

The face was extremely important, of course, so using the symmetry tool in procreate I made a face that I could paste on each of my pages to make sure the distance between the child's features were consistent.

Alien

I was working on both the character designs back and forth so almost everything I said about the child applies to the alien as well! I made their arms not symmetrical to help with continuality.

Their style changed throughout too!

Wrap Up

I learned the hard way that at a certain point you just have to make those big decisions about a project and get working! I have severe chronic back pain that has been incredibly painful that last few weeks. I was staying on my timeline for this book pretty well, but those few weeks set me behind. I wish I would have made decisions faster throughout this project, I would have had a lot more done!

I am just very relieved I am basically done with the writing and composition for the book. That really was the most time consuming part for me and now it's time to just draw, draw, draw! Here are some examples for the cover of the book and a space illustration I was working on that may be inspiration for some of the pages of my book!