THE THREE BILLY GOATS GRUFF DUMMY BOOK COVER

This is the cover I have for the dummy. I posted the entire cover (front/back) and a close up of the front. There's not much in the way of point of view, but I thought it did a good job of introducing the goats. I decided to leave the troll out of the cover.

I'm still working on the last pages of the book. ANY feedback, good or bad, is really always welcomed. 

I hope to take pictures during the assembly process and post them here in the coming weeks.

IF: ADAPT

The Troll is trying to adapt to the changing circumstances by compromising with the two Billy Goats and letting them cross the bridge while waiting to eat the older bigger brother.

I missed last week's IF and missed visiting many of my favorite blogs...I really need to catch up! It was a busy week since we are wrapping up the school year and there's a lot of functions and extra curricular activities for the kids. The next couple of weeks will probably be  just as busy as we try to adapt to the new summer routine. I'm not looking forward to the scorching heat that's for sure!

My goal is to finish, print and bind the Three Billy Goats Gruff dummy book before our summer vacation which is in about a month. It seems like a lot of time, but really with all of the stuff that I have going on, seems a bit unrealistic. Well, nothing like working under pressure!

Have a great weekend, and thanks for stopping by.

IF:PARADE

The Small Billy Goat Gruff was unaware that the Troll was about to rain on his parade. Crossing the bridge would not be so easy!

This is a stretch for this week's IF.  However, I am happy to be making progress on this dummy book. I will be adding the text after I am finished. So the bridge may seem a bit much, but that's where the text is going to be.

I am painting birdhouses at the moment to give myself a break from the troll and goats.

Have a great weekend!

ROUGH - PICTURE BOOK DUMMY

I really wanted to see what the accordion dummy book format would look like. Seems like an added step, but at the moment it helps me visualize the final product. The final dummy will be 7” x 9”, so that it would be easier to print, but this dummy is 85% smaller. Now that I can see and flip through the pages, I can begin to make the tight sketches for each spread. I have a meeting with my local SCBWI and look forward to getting some feedback on both the characters and the rough dummy.

Some questions I'll ask the group (and feel free to comment if you know the answer) are: Does everyone still work with this accordion format? Is there a difference between the dummy you submit to a publisher hoping to get it published Vs. the dummy you make during the production process of a book? 

WHY CREATE A PICTURE BOOK DUMMY FOR YOUR PORTFOLIO?

One of the things I took away from the Florida SCBWI Conference was that if you are trying to stand out and show your skills as an illustrator, you can not leave things to chance or hope that an AD can look at your work and imagine how it would fit in with their manuscript. You need to show them!

For instance, if you want to illustrate a children’s book, don’t expect to be noticed by having amazing portfolio pieces that would be perfect in a children’s book, but don’t show your understanding of the publishing world. But, how do you show understanding if you have never been published, you might ask? Well, create your own book. Illustrate and entire book for your portfolio, and have it bound (dummy). It doesn’t have to be an original story; it could be a public domain story that you take to show your strengths as and illustrator. There are many reasons for doing this, but mostly it shows an AD that you can take a character and portray him consistently throughout a story. It also shows that you understand the ins and outs of book publishing such as layout, bleeds, gutter space, word placement, flow, continuity, assembly, story-telling etc.

Hearing this at the conference really made a lot of sense to me. Many years ago I had the opportunity to interview many print graphic designers that were trying to make the transition to web design, and unless they had specific web samples in their portfolio, I could not be sure that they really understood the web world, even if their work was top notch. Designers that had web design samples always had an advantage.
Needless to say, I am now creating my own book dummy to include in my portfolio. I must say that creating one illustration Vs. illustrating an entire book is completely different, and if you are an aspiring children’s book illustrator I highly recommend it.

I am illustrating the Three Billy Goats Gruff. I started out with the character studies of the goats and the troll, shown on previous posts. I need to work on a color version of the characters and change the troll to have one eye. Since the story calls for a one eyed troll (I’m learning that it’s important to be true and honest to the story).

I would like to make more progress but at the moment all I have is a few hours a week for this, so it may be a while before you come to see something other than goats and trolls on this blog.

Below are the thumbnails for the layout. These are based on a 32 page picture book with 4 pages of front matter. The sketches are very loose and a little bigger than a stamp to focus primarily on flow, overall composition and layout. I first started with the text and broke it up into sections/pages to then illustrate that part of the story. There are a few pages that I’m not quite sure about…still making decisions…

ANY comments and criticism are welcomed!