Final BA Project week 17

It's already summer! Spring was so late and so quick. A few more days left to end my final project at the art academy. I'll take some photos of my graduation show on Tuesday. Before that, I need to make some conclusions about my creative process so I can talk about it during the presentation. Here's an overview of the story development during these four busy months.

Below you can see how my story begins. I'll show the rest of my finished spreads next week.



The author was creating an extraordinary story, but forgot something very important. The main character was missing! What?! How on earth would someone forget something so important? It seems that everything is possible in the creative process. The author started looking for the main character for his story. However, none of the creatures he met was suitable and even worse, they were haunting and annoying him. Did the author give up on his search? He definitely lost his patience at the end. Ironically, rejected characters became part of the author's story, which eventually turns out to be about himself. What a discovery!

But the journey doesn't end here since imagination plays a huge role in my book. The reader is welcome to interpret the story as he wants. There are a lot of questions and no obvious answers. The main character is mysterious. There's not a single word in the book describing him. The author describes the characters he meets but we can only guess what they are thinking as they don't speak. We don't know much about the author, but he's the one telling his story to the reader so we follow him along not knowing what to expect. That's exactly how I felt when I was creating this story.

The initial idea for this project was an action sequence with contrasting and interacting characters in a form of a concertina book. I was thinking in adjectives such as big/small, loud/silent, quick/slow. I also had an idea for a character alphabet, but soon abandoned it due to its restrictive educational purpose. I also didn't want to limit my audience to little kids. I aimed at creating unique characters and enjoying the creative process. I understood that it's better to leave more questions and space for imagination than give away all the answers. My thoughts struggled with my feelings, just like the author did with the random characters. I had to embrace uncertainty and use it to my advantage.

While the random spontaneous characters were easy to make, the character of the author was very hard to create. First of all he's invisible like most narrators are and we can only hear what he's saying. At the beginning, he had an arrogant attitude and was complaining directly to the characters how bad they are. I had an image of  a character from my previous book to visualize him. At one point, I even used him surrounded by all the characters in a huge final spread. This spread was eliminated when I decided I won't use the same characters twice in my book. It only had twelve spreads without the title page so each one had to be unique. I also didn't want my story to end with an obvious answer so this idea was rejected.

Hey, I wanted to be the main character!

 Doesn't look like you belong here...

The author's speech changed the most during all this time. Adjectives changed into verbs to describe specific action and relate to the author, for example, the creatures ate his thoughts, followed him, stared at him and surrounded him. I even rhymed some of them to emphasize repetition. I explained my progress with typography in the previous post. It was a really long and frustrating process, but in the end I realized that I needed something more playful and expressive and hand-writing was closer to drawing experience. 

The main theme of my book is the analysis of creative process, which is a collaboration between thoughts and feelings. It is such a unique experience. It is not something you can repeat again and again. Every time the creative journey is different and unpredictable. There is so much to it that it can't fit in a single book. The main character is found only in the reader's imagination. The book was supposed to challenge thinking, encourage reflection and inspire to experiment.

Final BA Project week 11-16

I'm back and my book is already sent for printing! What a long and unpredictable journey it was.

I was struggling at the end finding the right words to tell my story and expressing my own voice. I'm not a master at typography so this explains why I was so slow with this part of my book. Although I liked the contrast of digital text and traditionally painted illustrations, I felt like it was restricting my self-expression. So I took a water-brush and spent a whole week writing verbs in each spread to express specific action. I also used coloured ink so it turned out to be more playful.

Below is an example of my progression with typography on a single spread from my book. I kept changing sizes, typefaces, compositions and words until I found the right solution for it.

I only had a week to work on my handwritten words before sending my book to print. It was both stressful and enjoyable at the same time!

 

 

I felt so overwhelmed by the typography at one point, I didn't draw for quite a long time. Fortunately, I'm coming back to sketching again. Here are some random characters from my sketchbook. I used a couple of them in my picture book.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My final BA project is not over yet, so there will be more updates later on, including finished spreads from my book and some reflection on my story. Thanks for waiting!

Final BA Project week 9 and 10

These past two weeks, after coming back from Bologna, I was working on my BA project non-stop. I played with my rough compositions and tried to integrate the text as a character. I'm using InDesign again for this project as I did in my previous collaborative book.

During the ninth week I was in a bit of a standstill and unsure what to do with the text in my book. I simply made it static and monotonic only to see that it wouldn't work for my story. This explains why I didn't show any progress last week - there was hardly any at all! Luckily, I regained my confidence after getting some good critique and advice last week. I realized once again that the text had to play an important role and interact with other characters. How else can the author express his emotions if he's not visible anywhere in the book? This is not an ordinary book after all!

I chose a sans serif typeface as I liked its solid contrast compared with my painterly characters. It's going to be black against the plain white background throughout all the book. I think this solution follows my main goal of simplicity quite well. However, it's easier said than done and so hard to achieve good results. The best examples of such books I found are either Asian or created by designers using simple colours and shapes.

This week I'll keep working on my story as it needs further development. I'll also print some original size sample spreads and choose the paper I like. By next week my project should be 75% finished and my story well developed and convincing. I still don't have a decent ending to my story so I'm ready for something unpredictable. That's how it works with the creative process. Embrace uncertainty and improvise! It's one of a kind project for me, where the story is driven by random characters and thoughts instead of an obvious main character and a clear plot. I'm glad I took this challenge, but now I have to make it a proper book with the beginning, the middle and the end!

Here are the first five spreads from my book. You'll see more next week!

    

Bologna Children's Book Fair 2013

Last week I spent four days in Bologna Children's Book Fair, which was celebrating its 50th anniversary. This was my first visit and it really was a one of a kind experience with thousands of children's books from different countries and a whole spectrum of publishers. Some of them had very long queues of young illustrators waiting to show their portfolios. Others, such as Topipittori and Corraini, were always crowded, so it was quite hard to look through their books. I really enjoyed the Illustrators exhibition with 385 beautiful illustrations. The guest of honour this year was Sweden and there were lots of Swedish books and contemporary illustrations on display. Below you can find my small selection of photos from this huge international fair.

Display of the best publishers of the year

 

Illustrators exhibition



 

 

Contemporary Swedish illustration

 

A glimpse at the events the fair offered this year

 

A long wall for ads and self-promotion



 

 

Final BA Project week 6

Week after a week I'm getting closer to my goal and facing more and more challenges along the way. There are so many things to keep in mind when making your own picture book. It's not a quick process, indeed, but at least it's enjoyable.

I'm halfway through with my BA project and for now I have established a basic storyline and made a small dummy book. The text will be integrated in my illustrations and will be an important part of design. The spreads you see below are quite experimental and although I want them to be playful, I'll have to work on the overall feel of my book. Even a total chaos should have some harmony in it.

 

I think it's a perfect time to step back from this project and take a short break. Next week I'll be visiting Bologna Children's Book Fair together with my sister. I'm really excited because we've never been there before and this year the fair is celebrating its 50th anniversary. We'll get a closer look at the publishing industry and the vast variety of children's books from all over the world.

No post next week, but expect lots of photos once I come back. See you in April!