illustration3DJPhillips

Childrens book research

Highly reccomend giving this a read, it's very helpful:

http://www.merga.net.au/documents/MERGA33_Marston.pdf

It's about creating picture books that help develop a young readers brain, through mathematics and using concepts and basic principles that it describes, basically instead of making terrible picture books that'll just turn your kids brain to goop. Very good read.

I figured "Where the Wild Things Are" is the best, so I decided to research and analyse it, in order to get a better idea of underlying themes, concepts, and messages displayed throughout it.

The title.
Even this title is probably too scary for children of a young age, out of context, but using the images that it has on the front cover it makes the childrens book seems very playful. Images are key.

The book helps develop a kids imagination. It is basically a dream journey.

Max is sent to his room where his imagination grows and he sails out into a dream where he is able to tame monsters. these monster could represent his emotions (overall taming his emotions).

The borders of the pages grow as his imagination does until we see a full double page spread of him and these monters in this dream land. And after he comes back home we see the border at a comfortable size compared to the dream border.

Great childrens book with many hidden meanings and also some references back to mythology (such as warewolves, max's get-up, and the monsters resembling "all devouring behemoth").

And although it is a frightening story, for children it works. The style of linework is very interesting and maybe I could use that style for my own images.

Finals

I applied this style to my other pages. I decided on fitting the whole text into four pages. I kept to the colour scheme of Bill Wattersons 'Calvin and Hobbes' cover page, and also applied his heavily lined style.

I'm really happy with these images:

Final development

I needed to characterise my cows more. Having realistic cows would not do well with kids, but cartoonising them would make it more readable and have a better connection to children than realistic cows.
Using artist model reference from Bill Watterson, I caroonized the cows. I'm also thinking of using his style of linework and possibly colour.

Here Are some compositions layouts for my pages:

Finals for page 1:

I used a colour scheme from Bill Wattersons 'Calvin and Hobbes'. This is his best cover for one of his comics in my opinion. My version came out a bit more earthy than his colours but I think my page1 still looked really good.

Character development + Cow

Here are some compositions using a cow as a character. I used reference from this childrens book space artist model:

Ramu Moon

I think the colours work quite well, and I tried to copy the style of the artist a bit with my figures:

From here I thought maybe I could just use a cow instead of a cow and human in space, to make it easier for the children to interperate the story a bit more, rather than having multiple very different looking characters.

I then thought of possibly having two cows, as I needed two characters since the text says "WE make a ship" not "I". Two cows makes a party

Cows

I had an idea of using a cow as one of my characters, just because I figured children would make an association with cows and moons, through the well known nursery rhyme. It seems some other children's writers/illustrators have has this same idea. Children's books such as "goodnight moon", which uses a cow jumping over the moon as one of the dominant characters in the text and illustrations. Although "A trip to the moon does not mention cows, I believe this idea could be visually stimulating for the children IF i get it right.

http://alumni.colorado.edu/2014/06/23/picture-books-3d/

Here are some Cartoon and realistic images of cows I will use as reference for my cow characters: