So, this week we were given three fairy tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Jack and the Beanstalk. We were to pick one, figure out pagination, and then decide on how we wanted to represent it visually.
My trouble: I hate fairy tales. They’re often morbid and full of cheeky, belligerent children and/or horribly abusive adults. Yes, we all read them, and I’ve read them to my kids, but I didn’t want to be dragging my feet the whole time I was going through this class. What I’d love to do is completely change the meaning of the story through the illustrations — have the story give you the usual tale, but have the art say something completely different. But I’m not feeling passionate enough about such an endeavour at this time.
What I REALLY want to do is try all this stuff with one of my own stories. Now, the teachers warned us that we probably DON’T want to do that. That we want to use these fairy tales to learn all the ins and outs of illustration first, so that when we illustrate our own we won’t mess up so bad.
But I’m comfortable with messing up. Art it messy. Life is messy. And I have a story or two to start learning how to illustrate. If I want to scrap it and do it again, then I will. If not, then I’ll have an original story to add to my portfolio, and more importantly, to print off for my kids.
So, here’s to messing up!
…And I just realized I threw out my notes that took me to the next step, so I’ll just have to describe it for you.
After editing my story to make sure it was ‘perfect’, I printed it off, scratched a ton of things out, and reorganized a lot of text: I’m messy that way. Once I had started trying to paginate things and picture what illustrations would be going where, I realized that a lot of my text was unnecessary. And extra text in a children’s book is almost criminal, especially when you’re a tired parent reading to a tired kid — nobody needs extra words at that point.
So I adjusted my ‘perfect’ text.
Then I cut my text up into little pieces. Yup, still messy. And I glued them onto these helpful pages from www.inkygirl.com . Great for visually planning and messing around. I know we’re supposed to flesh out our characters and environments more, so I kept it at a very simple and messy sketch level, just to check that my text divisions were going to work. I’m actually still a little unsure about a couple of choices, but we’ll just see how it rolls out.
My main character’s name is going to change, but I like sticking my kid’s names in my rough drafts — it makes them more fun to read to my test audience 😉 .
Also, they really do like to dig:
