Layout Idea's and character sketches

Layout Idea's:

To start off with my layout of my children's book I had to chose between two different lengths of which a children's book commonly uses.

My choices were either:

• A5 
• 140mm x 140mm

My choice of dimensions that I wanted to use for my children's book is A5. With this in mind, I went onto make a base layout in which I could then go over and fill with my text and images. The layout base featured guidelines of where I would fit everything into each other and can be seen here:

This shows off the guidelines used in my Children's book in which I will fit everything into. The largest middle rectangle will be where I place my character and the background will go around it to the cyan lines which create a large square. Below that is two small cyan lines close together which will host the name of the character and opening line of the page. This is done again but with more space to allow room for my story to go in between at a bigger font.

The rest of the space unmentioned is unused space which proposed problems later on with making a background for the character and book.

Ultimately this layout idea would go unused and I decided to convert this into a 140mm x 1400mm set of guidelines by just resizing the canvas. This caused a few problems where I had to reassign lines to make sense with the new canvas.

The new layout design: 

Doing this allowed for less used space and also worked within the lines of me creating my backgrounds with the intention of being landscape instead of a portrait view like the first original guide.

Character sketches:

This shows the creative process in which I created my lead character for the children's book. On the very left you can see my original sketch done using a pencil on paper, the lines are a little rough but this would of then gone on to be re-drawn and created digitally for my book.

The middle image shows off my finished drawing for a page in the book, once I had finished my drawing and was happy with it, I then wanted to move onto creating a little graphic for the front cover.

I used different layers as well as the shape tool to create a small graphic of the character within a circle but the upper half of the head going outside of the circle. The circle itself has used an blending option of a small and soft bevel and inside, a gradient of soft light golden shades.

My second example of the creative process of my Children's book features another character within the book drawn using a pencil. I did this for most characters before putting each one into photoshop to re-draw and create digitally. In this image, I took a different approach and style to how the character and scene would look. Instead of keeping the character a solid and plain colour, i used the dodge and burn tool to create highlights and shadows within the image. For the the actual bed, I used a gradient in the ranges of purple and for the pillow, a radial gradient.





The last and final example of my character creation process features a snail character I have created as part of my children's book. Like every other example given, I started off with a pencil sketch and drawing of my character. The creation and process of this stage was extremely simple as a snail is a pretty simplistic and easy in design. Once this was done, I did the same to what I did with my previous example above. Dodge and burn allowed me to create the highlights and shadows using a 100% exposure which I think came out very well on the shell of the snail character I have created.

Colour palette:

Admittedly, I didn't do this for every character I created but for a large portion of the characters, I did. The colour palette I created allowed me to take and use colours as I went through the process and were all natural colours taken from the actual animal I was creating characters around. The page I used as a colour palette is fairly simple in design and only features the name of the animal followed by the different swatches of colour which will make up the character once I have done the lineart for said character.