Book Illustration!

So, in a nutshell, the senior illustration class competed against each other to create a book dummy and two finished pieces from it illustrating a song. The winner of that would get their book published and a monetary award of $4,000. 

Below is quite the long entry so click if you're seated and comfortable. 

Aw, man. This was an interesting project since I got to learn the process of illustrating a children's book with specifications from the editor. I got the lyrics of "I Met a Bear," which is essentially about the narrator meeting a bear and running away from it:

THE OTHER DAY I MET A BEAR

By John Feierabend

The other day, I met a bear.

Out in the woods, Away out there.

I looked at him, he looked at me. I sized up him, he sized up me.

He said to me, “Why don’t you run, I see you ain’t got any gun.”

 I said to him, “That’s a good idea,” So come on feet, let’s up and fleet.

 And so I ran, away from there, But right behind, me was that bear.

Oh, what do I see, ahead of me, A great big tree, Oh, glory be.

The lowest branch, was ten feet up, I’d have to jump, and trust my luck.

And so I jumped, into the air,

 But I missed that branch, away up there.

Now don’t you fret, and don’t you frown,

 ‘Cause I caught that branch, on the way back down.

 This is the end, There is no more,

 Unless I see that bear once more.

I found an idea from a (rather generalized) Inuit legend of bears, when hibernating, would release their spirits to wander the wilds. So I took this spirit bear concept and created a story where the ghost bear would chase after a startled and frightened Athabascan child with the intentions to return a dropped walking stick, though it does not seem that way at first. (Because, come on, being chased by a ghost bear is some scary shenanigans.)

There were tons of revisions and a lot of rough drafts, naturally. I don't quite have them all scanned in (and they never got returned coincidentally) so I'll show as much as I can from the initial stages of the two finished illustrations.

So these were the pages for the first book dummy that I chose later on to be my final illustration pieces. When it was met by the editor, however, it was clear that the ending needed fixing, especially these two pages. The editor wanted to show a more obviously helpful bear in the first set as it seemed that the boy had just landed on a branch instead of being uplifted and set down by the bear. In the second set, the editor advised that perhaps the ending was better off showing a friendship between the two characters rather than the bear leaving behind a puzzled boy on how he had managed to get down to safety.

 

So the first set was redrawn to make the spirit bear look like it was physically setting down the boy while the second set was shown to have the bear waving goodbye to his new thankful friend who realizes that the bear was trying to help him all along.

In the end, the completed pages became a bit different from the book dummy, but still maintained the general idea (hopefully, haha). Critically, I wished I didn't spam so much on the textures as it made the illustrations feel a little...not-so-together...? There's also the fact the first illustration was done with more patience than the second as the latter is not so refined (not to mention the wonkiness of the bear). Still, I enjoyed drawing the snow and all the textures. The boy's face was also fun to draw, though, I think I might have put too much detail in it; it pops out rather starkly in the first illustration.

tl;dr CHILDREN'S BOOKS TAKE A LONG TIME.