Christmas Cards

Taking a break away from the tedious job of sorting out my layouts for an hour or so today and I came up with Christmas card ideas that I though would work well aimed at children.

Issuu

http://issuu.com/aislingcrosland/docs/mmcolourroughsfinal

This Issuu link is to my final roughs for my book including the front and back cover. I still need to add the text to the pages and correct a spelling mistake on the back cover. 

Working on Cover

Creating the Cover (roughs)

1st Double Page

As I mentioned earlier in my 'reflections' I was really unhappy with how my first double page spread looked. I was just going to leave it and not count it as one of my final outcomes but it was really bothering me so I went back to change it and here is what i've come up with for the new pages...

This was the first attempt to change it, I made the colours less 'in your face' and added a path to the image but it still didn't look right. I did like the characters in the scene though so I decided to keep them but just work on the background.

I drew a car and added colour and texture (from my ink dipping) to it, it made sense to have the car somewhere in the image even if it was only in the background since what the characters are meant to do doing is packing the car up with moving boxes to go to their new home. 

The next thing I wanted to work on was the texture added, the textures in the earlier images just hadn't worked at all in my mind. But remembering how well the textures I made with ink worked when added subtly I decided to try making my own drawn grass texture to add. (above)

This ended up being the new outcome. I think it still needs some work before it becomes a final outcome but it's much better than what I had before !

Editing Pages

I said in my reflection that I wanted to try and make the nighttime pages a bit darker, this is what I have come up with so far.. 

The picture above is the one I edited, it isn't really much different i've just made is look a bit darker and grimier but I already think it's starting to look better than the original image below. 

The below image is the original, it was clearly too bright and cheery for a scary nighttime scene. The image above is how it looks now i've started to edit it, it's already looking MUCH better but it still needs work doing to it to make it scarier. 

Reflection

Sat 23rd Nov - 
Since I have about a week left of this project I thought now would be a good time to reflect and identify any issue i've had and things that need to be changed. I'm at the stage now where I have finished all my roughs for my book and am about to move forward onto the final outcome. One thing I need to work on is obvious, and that is the cover. So far I haven't done anything on the cover besides a few quick idea sketches, this is the main thing I will focus on for this final week of the project.  

Issue number one for me, if you look at my coloured roughs (http://issuu.com/aislingcrosland/docs/mmcolourroughs) is the first double page spread ! I'm not exactly sure why but I know that I really don't like it. I'd like to spend some time to re work it, but since from the beginning of this project I agreed to produce 4 final outcomes and the cover this page isn't my top priority. (Just something I will look into if I have the time)

I'd also like to go back and play with the darkness and shadows on the pages where the little girl is meant to be scared, I feel like the images aren't quite scary enough. I don't want them to be really scary since this is a book that would be read to or with a child before bed but at the moment the images don't feel dark enough to me. 

Another thing I need to look at is layout, I've noticed by turning my images into a book using issue that some of the images meant to be on one page are too big and have crossed over the guttering. This won't be too difficult to rectify but it needs to be done none the less. 

Finally I want to add the correct text to my images, rather than an indication of where text will go. This will help me work out exactly how much text is needed on each page, if pages need to be cut out and make me more aware to the relationship between text and image. 

I am slightly worried that the book itself is 30 pages long so far. A standard children's book is 32 pages including the title and end pages, because of this I might need to shorten/take out a double page spread (but then I guess that could solve my issue of not liking the first page?)

http://issuu.com/aislingcrosland/docs/mmcolourroughs

This is the link for my roughs with added colour and texture. There is still a fair bit to do but viewing it like this I am happy with how its coming along. 

Issuu

http://issuu.com/aislingcrosland/docs/mmroughs1

This is the roughs for my next children's book "Millie and the Monsters" 

It helps to lay the roughs out in the way to make sure i'm not loosing any important details from my images in the guttering.

Roughs for final pages

Images

Adding detail to images

Critique

Today in our critique we had to show 6 or more images that indicated where we were at thing point of our projects. (my chosen images are the ones above) I was really pleased with my feedback as it was very positive, my tutors really liked my character designs and thought that my work was coming along really well due to good time management. Some of the criticism I got was that I needed to think about little details to make my images more believable, for example the rooms inside would have skirting boards and light switches, another thing the windows outside were tall where as when you moved to inside views the windows were small and really basic. I think all of these points were valid and I intend to make these changes to improve on my work, all in all though it was a positive crit !