Tuesday, January 12, 2010

book project part 1-sketches

I have started working on a little educational book. This means I get to eat for another month. Peanut butter doesn't grow on trees, you know. So in celebration, I thought I would do some blog posts along the way to share my process.

(click to enlarge photos)
The first step is always setting down with the print out of the book pages, and making quick, little thumbnails of each page. This mostly gets me acquainted with what will appear on each page, and I take a rough stab at where things might go. This book has a tadpole as the main character and several other types of fish he meets along the way. Oh, that circled 21 on the page is when I counted up how many pages I was illustrating inside the book... it's NOT my IQ.

I now take another run at going through the book and making larger sketches. This time I work more on the composition and character designs as I go through it. I have found that I do a better job working small for some reason. When I try to draw full size, I get bogged down in the drawing and placement of things. It's much easier for me when I work small, so I made a template of pages that are about 1/2 actual size and made some copies of it to draw on.

This is the end of day two. I hope to have all pages drawn full size by the end of the week.

Isn't this exciting?

(yawn)... more TK.

4 comments:

pj said...

Very! Didn't realize you were doing the the layout for the entire book as well (not sure what I thought, come to think of it...). Thanks for sharing, Doug!

Alicia PadrĂ³n said...

This is great! Thanks for sharing your process. It's always wonderful to see other artist's work.
I love your frogs and tadpoles characters, they are adorable!

I work small too. Sometimes I have to control it a bit because the sketches then tend to get too small sometimes. But you are right it is much easier to control the composition that way.

I love your blog. I'll keep visiting for sure. :o)

Jannie aka Chickengirl said...

Always love looking at another artist's process. Fun!!!

Doug said...

I always enjoy seeing how other artist work, so I thought someone would like seeing how I do it.

PJ... the book was all laid out with art direction for each picture. I'm just going through and figuring it all out.