Brian Wonders: The Making of a Children's Book
The pirate bear is back. In an earlier post I promised he would get friendlier-looking, but I think he's just gotten weirder. Still, I really like him so I may leave him as is. He's definitely getting turned into stickers.
Here's the same pirate bear as he appears later in the book. Looks like I forgot to add his eye patch. Softened him up considerably, this is towards the end of the story.
Here's the sketch with a little color.
This week I've been fleshing out the ending of the book. The end to the story has been through many iterations, but recently I decided it would end with a kiss. Now that I'm done with the illustration, this ending will have to stick!
This week's time-lapse shows the creation of this illustration: from its humble beginnings as a thumbnail sketch, to the illustration taking its place among the other finished pages of the book. I had envisioned a simple pencil sketch for this illustration with maybe a wash of color over it, but somewhere along the way the thought of adding a magnificent swirl of hair on the girl crept into my head and I couldn't make the thought go away. It was very frustrating because a giant swirl of hair was going to add a few extra hours to the drawing, especially since I thought it would be even cooler if I first modeled the hair in CG... Once I gave in to the new direction, the drawing sort of snow-balled and I had no choice but to follow it where it wanted to go. The results are in the video and below.
BRIAN READY FOR HIS CLOSE-UP
The book opens on a wide establishing shot that pushes closer and closer in as you turn the pages. By the third page turn you land on a close-up of Brian, intensely focused and peering through his telescope. Hit play to watch the time-lapse of the drawing.
tiny sketch
This illustration started out as the quick sketch pictured above. I thought it had the right energy and proportions, but it was a teeny tiny sketch, and for the close-up I needed a large drawing of Brian's face in order to fill the page. Often it's impossible to recapture the spontaneity of a sketch, and after a couple of attempts I just blew up the tiny thing, printed it out, and that became my starting point for this illustration. I think I'm going to do more of that in the future. That's me tracing the sketch in the first few seconds of the video. My glass desktop also makes a great light table. I recommend it!
final black and white
I used India ink for the hair and to get some deep shadows. The rest of the drawing is graphite. Stay tuned for the next post--the coloring process that follows in the computer.
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TIME LAPSE: 999 LUFTBALLONS
Here's a quick time-lapse video of the work that goes into arranging a trail of one thousand balloons into a treacherous rolling ocean. This illustration appears in the middle of the book at the height of action, and I wanted the balloons to maintain the action like they were taking you on a roller coaster ride. They climb over a crest before turning the corner and dropping down, gathering speed before entering into the gullet of the emerging monster. The main reason I'm re-doing the balloons here is--when I decided the book should have no words, I felt I should highlight certain recurring motifs, like these balloons, in order to help better visually connect one page to the next.
THE LADIES OF THE WAVES
As a kid, my favorite part of the water park was hands down the wave pool. But the wave pool was also a scary place because of the wall at the far end. It had bright red signs all around it warning kids not to swim too close to it--because you would get sucked under by the wave machine, I was told. My head filled in the rest. But when I looked under to see this machine there was nothing to see--just a dark gash running across the bottom, from end to end, breathing. A gaping mouth ready to pull you in. I think I created these happy ladies of the waves to deal with that trauma.
Here's the process:
Starts out with loose ideas. Pencil on paper. The final pencil sketch gets cleaned up and scanned into the computer, then altered if need be.
This is the final pencil image. I altered the pencil color, turned it blue. I also added a string of balloons. This part doesn't need to be too tight, because it will get printed out and then painted on top of. It will serve as my underlayer for the acrylic paint stage.
Here's the final acrylic painting. Notice Brian was painted onto his own square. This is always my last resort when I can't get something in the painting quite right. The painting gets scanned back into the computer, where I adjust the colors and levels and it all gets finished off with additional details.
Details like this one: this is a layer of waves I rendered in 3D. This image is then drag and dropped on top of the painting. Nothing too technical here, just a basic wave shader on smooth planes. I just wanted to get some hard digital detail in the painting against the looser brush strokes.
Final image! Image scanned, color adjusted, CG waves added. The balloons were another element that was first rendered in CG and then blended into the illustration.
Don't forget we are pre-selling the Brian Wonders picture book here.
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More to come...
THE BIG PICTURE.
Here's a look at the big board! Our book has 48 pages, and this is how I keep track of the progress on each page. The spreads get printed out and posted up so I can stand back and get a look at the big picture at once. It's incredibly helpful. This is also helps me get a sense for the pacing of the images and how they flow from one page to another.
Green tags mean the page is done; pink tags mean there's still some work to do. Yes, there's a lot of pink tags, but for the most part the pages just need a final pass of bubbles or a quick overall freshener, which I'll do in the computer.
The big board also helps in instances where I've made a change to the story that has had a rippling effect. For example, after adding the bear to the story (Journal Entry 10), I needed to keep track of where he should reappear, meaning, popping him into pages that were already finished...
Here's another spread that is pretty close to being done (bottom right), but to which I'm going back and adding a shark. In an early version of the book I had a whole page dedicated to a swarming school of these hundred-eyed sharks, but that idea ended up on the cutting room floor. Then I thought, I'll just add the sharks to another page!
TIME-LAPSE: pirate bear!
Here's an illustration starting from scratch. It's a pirate bear that appears early in the story. Yes, maybe he looks a little scary in drawing form, but he'll be made plenty kid-friendly when he gets his color treatment and gets his hair all done. In any case, I think it's always a good idea to mix in a little scary for good measure.
He does have two sets of eyes at the moment... the dark beady ones on top, and then the glaring ones just below those. Any preference? One of the sets will have to go.
And thank you again for pre-ordering the book at brianwonders.com!!
TIME-LAPSE
Just a quick follow up on the last post... Time lapse of the illustration in progress...
THE PAINT-ON-PAPER PART OF IT: AKA, RENDERING
This drawing had me frustrated for the longest time and I just kept procrastinating working on it. Finally this week I had to deal with it, and I think it's turned into one of my favorite pages. I think what cracked it was giving the characters all clothes to wear underwater! They were supposed to be colorful fish, and so I gave them colorful swimwear. I also added the snorkel cat and an alien fish to fill in some holes in the composition. This one is about 80 percent there as far as rendering goes.
This drawing will get scanned in, and I will add finishing touches to it in the computer. Painting was all done in acrylics. Stay tuned, I will be posting a time-lapse of this one's painting in progress.
And a quick thank you for continuing to pre-order the book!
DESIGNING THE SLIPCASE
The actual book production is really interesting. The first edition book will have a special slipcase to protect it. (See the fancy mock up in red, top right?) A San Francisco based letterpress shop is die cutting and scoring the slipcase. Tell us, would you deboss or foil stamp the title on the slipcase?
