the making of … – Page 8

Sneak Peek Week

Hi everyone,

as I’m feeling incredibly lazy, but also superbusy, I’ve decided to just show a couple of sneak peeks of the final artwork.

Here’s page 4:

breakfast

And here’s the panels from pages 10-11.

Ive decided to become a Viking Pop

Set design- interiors

Last week I blogged about the designing the outside of Nan and Pop’s house. This post is about the inside.

Most features were made up, but one room has its basis in real life- Pop’s hallway is based on Norm’s hallway.

When I first visited Norm’s house, I was amazed at his collection of Viking artefacts. They take pride of place in the hallway, just as you enter the house.

Here’s Norm’s house, with Norm. Get out of the way Norm, I’m trying to take a photo.

That’s better.

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I grew up in a house that my great-grandparents built in 1936. Four generations of my family have lived in the house (only two at a time though); my parents and sister still live there. Its a Californian bungalow design, common in older suburbs around Perth like East Fremantle and Mt Hawthorn.

I remember snippets of visiting my great-grandparents when they were still living in the house. I was only 3 or 4. Great-grandma would take a tray of just-baked cupcakes out of the Metters stove. We would sit in the front room and eat, while family members with big white moustaches that I didn’t know the names of looked down from frames on the mantlepiece. Great-grandma was always smiling, at least I think she was- or maybe that’s a made up memory based on the only photos I know of her. I don’t remember great-grandpa very much. In his photos he looks kind.

Pop’s house in The Last Viking is essentially my family home. Obviously my parents don’t live in a house with Viking ornamentation all over it, but the basic similarities are there.

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Creating the Cover Part 4- the final final cover

Hi everyone,

the book has gone to print now. All the work is done- for now. There’ll be promotional things to do later on, and a launch in a few months- but for now we can relax a little and await the finished product. Soon, Norm and I will be holding advance copies of The Last Viking and giggling like it’s Christmas.

Originally I’d intended only three posts in this series showing the development of the cover- but, there’s some final changes to show.

Book designer extraordinaire Tracey Gibbs finished her work on The Last Viking last week. She added the text to all the pages, cleaned up images, and adjusted the cover.

Here’s what the cover looked like in the last post:

…and here’s what it looks like now.

I love it, I think it looks much better. You can see the title text is slightly smaller and a different colour now. Our names are bigger. Tracey has also increased the brightness and saturation of the colours. (We may have a ‘spot varnish’ on the printed cover- where certain parts will have a glossy coating added).

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Creating the Cover Part 3- final colours

Over the last two weeks I’ve talked about the initial designs and how Cate and I refined those designs. Now- here’s how I coloured it in.

I started off doing all the shading in light brown, just as I did for all the internal pages. This helps me see from the start where the light sources will be. (For those digitally minded, the light brown layers are actually a dark brown colour, but set to 40% opacity. As I’m using Corel Painter, I’ve set the layer mode to Gel rather than the standard Photoshop choice of Multiply- Gel seems to let the colours interact the way they would do if they were watercolour paint. I’ve found it produces richer colours).

Here’s the brown tones (what I’ve called the ‘sepia layer’) half done.

And the sepia layer completed. If I can see a sense of depth in the picture at this stage, then I know that it’s all going to look okay once the colours are completed.

Next up was the background colours. The sky and cloud tones are very important as they contribute greatly to the effect of light.

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Creating the Cover, Part 2- refining the design with Cate

In last Tuesday’s post I showed the first tiny sketches for the cover. I also showed you a mockup I sent to Cate for feedback- here it is if you missed it.

She had a good look at it, and emailed me back to say that it looked like the different parts of the cover were competing for attention. If they were rearranged a bit it might look more balanced. She also said that brown generally doesn’t look good on a cover, so she switched the border to blue. She fiddled around with the different elements and sent the cover back to me, looking like this:

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Creating the Cover, Part 1- initial designs

Hi everyone,

I’m going to run you through the process we took to design the cover. I’ll split it into three parts- initial design; refining the design with Cate; and final colour.

So- initial design… Norm and I started by looking at the posters for epic adventure movies- things like Lord of The Rings, Star Wars, Indiana Jones – and of course, Viking films. Adventure films all have a similar ‘design dialogue’- features that set them apart from other movie posters, and make us think adventure without realising it. There are often many characters shown on the poster- the heroes, the villains- and maybe an important scene from the film, or a creature, or a vehicle of some sort. Characters are all sorts of different sizes, with the main characters towards the front and secondary characters smaller and more faded towards the back. Often you will just have a character’s head shown. They will often brandish their weapons. There is dramatic lighting. Etc. Posters for comedies don’t look like this. Posters for horror films don’t look like this. Posters for thrillers or ‘chick flicks’ or romantic comedies don’t look like this- they’re all features found on adventure films. And it doesn’t whether the film is set in Middle Earth or Norway or Nazi Germany or A Galaxy Far, Far Away- if it’s an adventure film, that’s how the poster seems to look.

Seeing as this picture book is a bit of an epic saga, Norm and I thought it would be good to follow the design dialogue of the adventure movie posters for our cover. Here’s the first thumbnails sketches I drew- they were very small, each only 3 or 4 cm across.

Cate liked the look of these and asked me to draw up a larger rough. Here’s what I came up with- this was my first sketch for the front cover:

Continue reading “Creating the Cover, Part 1- initial designs”

So I dreamt I signed up for a swimming marathon…

For the past two and a half months I’ve been colouring colouring colouring. And now, it’s all done. Hurrah! Crack open the virtual champagne, there’s also some digital soft drink around here somewhere if you’d rather, there’s microchips and dips, make yourself at homepage. Sorry, I’m a bit low on sleep at the moment and the filter in my brain has decided to conk out.

This book-making process began on the 7th of June 2009 , so it’s very exciting (and a great relief) to finally see it done. If all goes to plan The Last Viking will be out in the middle of this year.

As I type this I’m in the midst of getting ready to take a break- I’m traveling to New York for the Society of Children’s Book Writers’ and Illustrators’ annual Winter Conference. I’ll set up some posts for the next three weeks that will take you through the process of designing the cover of The Last Viking.

In the meantime, here’s a teaser- it’s the colour for one of my favourite scenes in the book. And when I say colour, it’s just the colour- I’ve removed the linework and the background and the borders 🙂

Onward to Glory,

James

P.S. you may be wondering what the title of this blog post is about. I completely forgot to say. A few weeks ago I had a very vivid dream in which I had signed up for a swimming marathon. I am not a particularly strong swimmer, so this was an odd thing for me to do. Even odder, it was a tandem event- you swam with a partner the whole way. Even ODDER- I had signed up to swim two races at once- one tandem, one solo. I was bumping into friends on the way to the start line and couldn’t stop to chat, because I had to get started on the race, everyone else had already gone, quick rush do it do it do it! Only thing was, I kept trying to get to the starting line and I could never find it.

So. Before we get too deep and psychological, I’ll tell you what it meant to me. I have been finishing this book with Norm. It’s been a tandem marathon. I’ve also been trying to get another book started, one that I’ve written and will illustrate myself. It will also be a marathon. And lately I haven’t been able to catch up with people as much because I’ve been head down bum up. It’s one of the few dreams I’ve had in my life where the meaning was completely obvious to me when I woke up.

And now that I’ve finished the illustrations, I can finally get some sleep 🙂

Colouring a scene

I’m in the midst of colouring. It’s going well, but I’m realising that there’s a lot more too it than just filling in the spaces between the lines… the colour contributes to the mood in just the same way that facial expressions, body language, point of view and composition do. Why do people make picture books?? I’m loving it, but the more I go the more I find how complicated the process can be.

Continuing on from last week, here’s how I’ve been colouring a scene.

I start off with the pencil lines:

Now I do a bit of planning. Where will the light source be? What time of day will it be? This little panel is part of a series where the backgrounds all join up. The sky will change from overcast in the left hand panel to stormy in the right hand panel. When it’s overcast the sunlight is diffused through the clouds and the light source seems to be coming from everywhere at the same time… shadows on the ground become lighter and softer. I’ve tried to do this with the panel on the left below, but it’s very hard to paint. It’s easier to define the objects in your scene if you have one clearly defined light source (see the panel on the right).

I do these colour tests in Photoshop because it’s very quick and easy to do so. The colour test is very important for me, because it gives me a plan. I’ve decided where I want the shadows to fall, I know what colours things will be (roughly), and I know that adjacent colours complement each other (or clash, if that’s what needed).

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Sketching a scene

Norm, Cate and I met up a few weeks ago to discuss the scene where Josh meets the bullies. We needed a new approach to the scene, as the old way wasn’t working.

We sat in a cafe and threw some ideas around; in the end, we’d come up with this.