Experimenting

Now that I am happy with the story and design I am moving on to colour work, and developing the final spreads. Above is an experiment with water colour on not paper (not sure why the scanner has picked up a blue hue over the eye - Gremlins!). I have tried to soften & stylise it a bit so it is less photographic and a little more child oriented, however the slightly yellow hue of the face makes him look a little sickly...I think I will do a couple more experiments over the next few days.

I have been struggling to find a book binder that will do short run/ single books for my dummy book... Blurb will do them at a reasonable price, and the right size, but you cant customise the endpapers....no good when overall design is important. Lulu don't do anything near the right dimensions, and trawling through various other book binders has proved similarly technical or cost prohibitive...so what to do?

Bind it myself! I have made a maquette using my home printer and a pretty basic stab binding technique (basically leave a tab on one side, and bind by poking holes through & sewing the pages together - googlay for plenty of tutorials). I am quite pleased with the results, and the larger format of this book works much better (approx 21 x 25cm inc bindings- see pen for scale). I am now planning on getting the pages printed on some nice paper and hand binding a few copies for the MacMillan Prize and to send out to some publishers & agents.

Dummy Book Version 2.0 & The London Book Fair

A couple of spreads from my rewrite and new business card designs for promoting the book down at the London Book Fair next week. I am hoping to meet some publishers, agents and other Children's book practitioners, gonna be a bit scary walking into a big room full of industry pro's in the big smoke all alone...time to nut up or shut up!

Note I have changed the title of the book, the original 'Timekeeper' title came from the original seed of an idea for the book when I was looking at stars and time, however I found as the book developed this element of the story became less important & overt. The new title is more reflective of the characters role/background and helps set the scene for the story... it is a little less assuming, and I like the juxtaposition of the luxurious, decorative style of the cover with the unassuming nature of the title.

A few new/ reworked  spreads for the rewrite. I am refocussing the story more around the main character and making a few tweaks to the design to improve overall legibility. I still need to write the text to accompany the new spreads... but that can wait until all the drawings are complete. I am aiming to have the new dummy book finished by the end of the week in preparation for the London Book Fair (16th-18th April).

Do it again Dummy! - it's hard to be a perfectionist.

Well having 'completed' my dummy book and done few critique sessions I have decided to undertake a bit a of a rewrite.

The process of making a picture book is very much like creating a dot to dot puzzle; you need to get just the right number of dots in the right pages so the overall image makes sense... the problem is it is all to easy to skip dots when you already know what the picture is supposed to be.

When choosing what each spread should contain I found I was focused far too much on trying to explain the plot, whereas a great deal of my story should be focussed around the main character. The end result was the events made sense but it was difficult to empathise or even like the main character so you didn't really buy into the whole thing.

So I have taken out a few pages, and rejiggered a few more...which gives me a whole bunch more work to do, but I think it will vastly improve the book overall. ( This is the new plan, blank pages are completely new pages, green post-it notes are major edits, yellow post-its are minor edits)

The moral of the story - get ideas into book format as soon as possible! flat plans are just not the same!

The Timekeeper: Progress update

After several (3-4 I think) long and stressful weeks work, I have now completed a dummy book for 'The Timekeeper'. Below are a few more spreads (but not many as I do not want to give the whole story away). I have a rough printed copy, which is slightly smaller than my originally intended size for the book, however I quite like it! It is a bit squiffy in places, a home printer and binding with a single fold is not ideal - a little more research into book binding techniques is needed before I produce the book for Macmillans.

I have sent a copy to a writer/ editor friend of mine who will hopefully help me tighten up the text a little - I am definitely better with pictures! So again I will wait for his feedback before making my final book.

The next step is to develop several pages to finished quality. I am aiming to complete a minimum of 4 spreads, as I am aiming to enter this book for the Macmillan Prize 2012 (a competition run by Pan Macmillan to encourage new illustrators into the children's book industry). I have included below a completed cover design, which could count towards my 4 spreads, however I would ideally like to enter pages from the main narrative, rather than the ancillaries - cover, end papers, etc. 

I have included a spread with text to offer a bit of a flavour of how the final book will read...as you can see definitely a bit of Dr Seuss influence in there! It has been a very long time since I wrote any poetry...maybe in my angsty teen years, but it was great fun!

The Timekeeper: Dummy Book Progress

I am currently developing a dummy book for my current project, with a working title of 'The Timekeeper'. Here are the first few rough pencil pages, plus one colour experiment. The final 32 page book will be full colour, produced using mixed media (my influences at the moment include Shaun Tan & Simon Bartram). I will also be writing the accompanying text with possibly a little influence from Dr Seuss & Edgar Alan Poe.

The story begins with an astronaut named Alan Shepard, commanding the second successful manned mission to the moon, Apollo 14. Little did NASA know he had smuggled 3 golf balls and the head of a six iron (making the handle from on board equipment). Shepard got one clean shot which he claimed went 'miles and miles and miles...'. Even an astronaut could not have imagined the journey that little golf ball had in store.

In a galaxy far far away an old man, who has been living in space since the dawn of time, is happily going about his business of building the universe one (clockwork) star at a time...Until one day a mysterious little orb, all covered in dimples, pops out of a wormhole and shatters his peaceful existence.

What happens next? well you will just have to stay tuned!

I read about Alan Shepard's moon golfing exploits many years ago, and have always been amused by the idea of it being our first contact with an alien species. I finally got the idea for this story while watching Professor Brian Cox's 'Wonders of the Universe series on the BBC. The idea that time as relative and only existing with the existence of the universe itself inspired the basis of Timekeeper character. The craftsman aspect is possibly down to my dad (who modelled for over 700 photos during the early development of the book) who is a skilled painter (and previously a carpenter). I also wanted to play around with mythological & religious ideas of a creator, or perhaps father time. All in all this book is the convergence of many loosely related items of fact and fiction weaved together.

I feel it is important to challenge children, and their parents! Making them to question the world around them helps create a curious mind...which in my opinion is the greatest gift you can bestow upon a child.

I hope to have a complete dummy book and a minimum of 4 finished spreads for the MacMillan Prize 2012 for children's book illustration, which closes on Tuesday 8th May 2012

Sketchbooks - Concept drawing

A few pages from my sketchbook showing some concept art for the children's book I am currently working on. It is a quirky, funny little story which I wrote a few months ago which should (hopefully) end up being a 32 page picture book playing on themes like the origins of the universe and cultural difference (I dont want to give too much away yet!).

These sketches were done using a standard 0.5mm HB mechanical pencil. I use them to nail down some of the disparate ideas I have for the story, playing with ideas for characters, compositional ideas, and motifs I want in the book. The final image is a flat plan I use to help me get an idea of how to break down the story and how I want to design the overall book.

Stay tuned to see how this develops over the coming months.