It's been a while since I've updated everyone on the status of my book. I am very excited to announce that Exploring the World Outside is finished and making it's way through the mail! I cannot believe that after months of work I am days away from being able to hold a finished book in my hands!
I want to take some time to tell everyone about the creative process I went through. So I've broken down the process into a few of the steps. Hopefully, the next few paragraphs give you some insight to what I was working on during the past couple months!
The Right Write.
Writing was a bittersweet experience. It was the most fun, but at times the most difficult. I believe my best
Writing was a bittersweet experience. It was the most fun, but at times the most difficult. I believe my best
writing came from when I was in a peaceful, stress-free environment and wasn't trying too hard. Just simply free writing. Try to think of it like doodling. Drawing pictures somewhat subconsciously. I think we all can agree that once in a while some of our most impressive pictures come from doodles in class! For me, writing this book was a lot like doodling. I didn't think much about it rather, I just let the words flow. I wanted the sound and structure of my writing to be simple and childlike with lots of imagery. You could find me writing most of my book under trees in the grassy parks of Point Loma's Liberty Station, at the beach, and in my own backyard-pen in my right hand, smoothie in the other!
So I may have made that sound like a breeze, but there were times I didn't feel confident. Just about the time that I was finalizing my poems we began to study poetry in my English class. However, the sonnets by Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Keats are far from the style I was going for in my little project and I began to feel pretty unworthy to call my book a "book of poetry". But with a little Dr. Seuss therapy I was able to boost my confidence. I tried to keep in mind that it was simplicity and a more of a storybook prose that I was going for. How many teenagers get to say they wrote and published a book? Not many. I should feel proud and I am!
Change and Rearrange
When I would finish writing my poems I would share them with my awesome Outside the Lens mentor, Rachel! Rachel would read them and let me know rhymes that didn't really work and punctuation that needed to be fixed.
Sketch
Sketch
I didn't begin sketching until until I was completely done with my writing. Originally, I made a lot of illustrations and each couplet had it's own picture on it's own page. But I took a step back and realized that not only was that a ton of work but I was also making it too complex than I wanted. I made many, many drafts of thumbnail sketches, which are mini, simple sketches. Finding the perfect illustration to accompany my writing was definitely one of my biggest challenges. I found myself making thumbnail sketches of each page over and over again until I finally came up with designs that I liked. Luckily, I have experience with this process as the cover design artist for Graphic Novel Project http://dp.hightechhigh.org/~hthcv-graphicnovel/ . Otherwise, this process could have been quite frustrating. I was super eager to be finished with my thumbnails so I could make my final sketches on Bristol board to prepare to paint!
Painting
So that's a summary of my process! It's hard to believe I've come this far. Don't forget to stop by The New Children's Museum June 9th from 4pm-6pm and check out my book in person. It's going to be a fun exhibition and I hear there will be cupcakes!
Talk to you soon!
Painting the illustrations for my book was so fun! It took a lot of patience though. Some of my sketches were pretty simple, but a few of them had a lot of detail-especially this one:
the tiny flowers took forever to paint because they are made up of so many different colors. My patience just about ran out!
Most of the time though, painting is really relaxing for me. It's sort of a mindless thing for me to do and allows me to escape from the stress of everything I have going on. I am very happy with my artwork, it's just how I imagined it would be!
Digital Editing/Layout
Most of the time though, painting is really relaxing for me. It's sort of a mindless thing for me to do and allows me to escape from the stress of everything I have going on. I am very happy with my artwork, it's just how I imagined it would be!
Digital Editing/Layout
When I got to the digital editing and layout part of the process, I was really excited. It meant that I was coming to the end! I scanned all of my artwork at a high resolution so that they would be good quality and then did all of my editing in Photoshop. I fixed any mistakes I made painting with water color (there wasn't too many!), added the text, and converted my files into jpegs so that I would be able to easily upload them to the site I used to publish my book.
So that's a summary of my process! It's hard to believe I've come this far. Don't forget to stop by The New Children's Museum June 9th from 4pm-6pm and check out my book in person. It's going to be a fun exhibition and I hear there will be cupcakes!
Talk to you soon!
Selah
