the beginning of my book, continued.

This week (from february 5-12) was meant to be the beginning of the creation of my book The Pine Bark Kids. The plan is to create an illustrated short story that looks to children's books for inspiration in page design while simultaneously telling stories normally reserved for adult graphic novels. The format will be a 40 page book with acrylic and collage illustrations. As of the creation of this blog, the pages have been sketched out, the story's been written, and the text has been set into place. At the point that this blog starts, I am beginning the rendering process of these pages. I hope to go back and outline the process that's gotten me to this point while documenting the successes and problems I have in this journey. Welcome to the first week of Focus!
Because of the fact that I started this process in December and even the very beginnings during the summer, I found this week to be working entirely with the preparation to begin my final pieces. Upon advice from my art teacher, Ms. Diaz, I decided that 11x17 Bristol board would be the best possible form to paint my final pieces. The relatively smooth finish of these thick paper pieces will be beneficial for a few reasons. The first reason is that this will make the paintings reproduce well; scanning bumpy paper and canvas board can produce less than stunning results, so I want to stay away from them. Additionally, because the final pieces will be about 9x16, or relatively small to some of the paintings I’m used to working on, the lack of tooth will give me some more control.
Because this week found me in a place that was just making sure that everything is prepared for when I really start cracking at the first paintings, I found myself looking back on my process thus far. The origins of the idea of the book started with doodles that absentmindedly formed during a warm summer day. I found myself drawing a tree with a sign that read “PINE BARK KIDS” on it, a boy with glasses, a boy with a hat, and a girl with a scarf. In December, I began the process of formally writing out the story as a four page short story empty of illustrations. The problem, I found, was that the lack of story told in the images caused an overcompensation on my part to make the story filled to the brim with plot. The result was a story that allowed for very little analysis into the characters’ minds or observation of the moments that make up their day to day life. I decided that the best way to fix this was to try to rewrite the stories with images. Working exclusively with storyboards, I loosely retold the story with just images. I found that this was really helpful. My natural tendency as an artist to look at little things, like the way your hands reach out to touch tall grass, pushed the story back into a place that felt closer to the feelings that the original doodles tried to evoke. They allowed the story to focus on the little moments. The next step was to rewrite the story so that the text would fit the images. This ended up with me turning the story from a 3 week long journey into a vignette of a 3 kids’ lives from afternoon on a Tuesday to the morning of a Wednesday. With eyes on my story board, I rewrote the story so that it would fit each page. Based on the fact that my project is meant to redefine the graphic novel and reexamine how text and image should coexist, it seemed to me that this creative process fit really well with what the core of this project is driving at. It seemed, as I was creating, that I was putting together a puzzle piece that had to fit together just right, each piece placed on the ground simultaneously. The final result of this week was sketching out the rough locations of each compositional element on my final Bristol board pieces. It looks good that I will begin my final paintings next week.