Hello everyone! The school year has begun and I am loving all my classes so far, but the one I am most excited about is M&M’s (co-instructors Melanie Hall and Megan Halsey, AKA M&M) Intermediate Illustration Design class. Our first project has to do with illustrating for a children’s book and we had to pick from story manuscripts that exist already and basically redesign one.

The first step was brainstorming. I never really brainstorm when I create art, I kind of just sit there for hours till a full concept comes to mind and then I just go for it. This process was very new to me. We were asked to just doodle anything that came to mind on the page that made us think of the characters of the stories we picked and it was a very interesting process. I picked a Japanese fairy tale called The Moon Maiden and there are four characters: the bamboo cutter, his wife, the moon princess, and the moon lady. Our doodles didn’t have to be perfect, our brainstorm sheets in general didn’t have to be perfect. Basically, I charted out what clothes they would wear and roughly what I wanted their faces and bodies to look like. Here are my sketches!

After this, we created two versions of a storyboard for how the story would play out and I like the first one that I did because I believe I paced it a little better than the second one because I was in a rush to get the second one done before the deadline. The lines are gaps for where the words are going to go. In general, I didn’t put much detail into the faces because I am going to do that later on.