Children's books

This week I've been working on the starts of the children's book illustrations.  I'm realizing how much pre-planning is going to go into this!  I've been sketching the characters from the book for a few years now (not terribly consistently, but I know what they look like), and had actually done a few full-page illustrations in colored pencil several years back.  Since I finished those pages, I went to grad school and my artistic skills and styles have changed somewhat since then.  I realized that before moving forward with the book I was going to need to take a few steps back.

A little note first on the book itself: I am purposefully being very vague on here about it!  I may be paranoid, I may just be cautious, but I worry about copyright issues, so won't be going into a lot of detail about the book just yet.  I will say this: the main character's name is Tom, and he's an animal, with a diverse group of animal friends.  How's that for vague?  I'll probably refer to "working on Tom" a lot in the future.  

OK, back to it.

The first thing I did was go to the library and look at children's books. I looked at different page layouts and illustration styles a few weeks ago, and this week went back for more.  I got out 9 books with very different styles/set-ups/media, and this time spent a lot more time really pulling apart my favorites and deciding what I liked and what I didn't.  I even started writing reviews of them in my Tom notebook. 

Then I started to sketch out some potential page layouts on a large sheet of paper:

One of my favorite books of the nine was called The Lonely Moose by John Segal (in the left corner of the photo above).  I loved the illustrations, the variety of page layouts, the Moose, and the storyline.

Another favorite is Fibblestax, written by Devin Scillian (a Detroit news anchor), and illustrated by Kathryn Darnell.  I've owned this book for probably a decade now, and I never get tired of flipping through it - it's just beautiful!!  Great storyline and gorgeous illustrations.  Plus it's about wordsmiths, and I'm a big 'ol Word Nerd, so it appeals to me on so many levels!

I also grabbed four or five books that have won the Caldecott Medal to get an idea of what is considered (by one group, at least) to be "good" illustrations.  I will be honest, I was slightly baffled by some of the winners.  The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick (another book I own and love) won, and it's very clear why (if you haven't read/seen that book, plus his follow-up, Wonderstruck, you should ASAP!); but so did a book called A Ball For Daisy, by Chris Raschka, which surprised me quite a bit...  Maybe it was the simplicity?

This post is long enough, so I won't get too much more into it here, but I've been thinking that I might post some of my reviews on here from time to time. They'll be short (like the brief paragraphs about the two books above), and will largely be about the illustrations. 

I'll also write more about the process I'm going through, working with my brother (the author), deciding what the best illustration based on what he's written would be, story boarding, etc. Exciting times, my friends!