A
loooooong while back I wrote a bitty story, Hidy-Bye Boy and made a
“dummy” for it. In this case, i.e. children's picture book
illustration a “dummy” refers to a practice or mock up of a book
idea. It includes the text of the story, laid out in sequence and
rough illustrations showing what you have in mind. Especially when
an illustrator “writes” a book, quite often a LOT of the story
will be told using the pictures......with the words providing key
directions. So's a mock up of how the author/illustrator plans on telling the story is crucial
in letting a publisher know the author/illustrator's vision for the picture book.
This
pencil sketch is the first incarnation of page one of the story's
text: “Hidy-Bye Boy loved to play hide and seek. He would hide
when it was time to......” It shows the main character, Hidy-Bye
boy playing hide and seek with his little sister counting down to go
and find him.
At the
time I was working on this dummy I was going thru a Photoshop phase,
and I decided to “sketch” the dummy page using outlines and
“fill” in Photoshop to show what was going on.
It had
the advantage of being clear about what was going on in the sketch. But
I also lost some of the charm of the pencil sketch. So recently, I
took up this project again.
I've been doing a lot of classical
painting of people, landscapes and wildlife. In this painting spree,
I've “remembered” or revisited a lot of really nice planning
techniques. One of which is to split your painting into only
light,medium,dark sections to see if you have the focus on the main
point of your composition. So that technique resulted in this little
sketch being done again, this time in three gradients of black
and white.
So now I
had a clue as to a value map for my illustration. I then decided on
my colors and matched the light, medium and dark values (and
intensity) of the different colors I wanted to use with my black and
white color map. You can see the result at the top of the post.
I love it. You are giving this non artist a glimpse into your world. Did you finish the book? I know a few great recipients.
ReplyDeleteHi Diane. Thanks so much for your kind words. I have finished writing the book, but I'm still in the process.....a loooooong process.....of submitting it to publishers. I'll certainly let you and maybe a few hundred of my "closest friends" know if I'm lucky enough to get published!(grin)
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