Deeper into the Deep Blue

For those wondering, yes... I've still been working on this project...

I noticed as I began working on the layout and thumbnails, I encountered some problems with the text. How much text do I want on each page? Does the illustration I want fit with the text on the page? How do I want to pace the pictures, layouts, and text? (Heavy with text and light with pictures, or full spread with text, or one side text and the other picture, etc.?) This part of the process, mainly the design, takes lots of time. There is thinking, laying out, sketching, playing with all of these in and out, trying this, or that, and reworking things. This can lead to many a nights of frustration and feelings of futile. Eventually, I found myself sprung into a dead halt. I felt like I smashed into a wall. That was a month and a half recuperation.
Then, I started just jumping ahead of myself. Since I'm still playing with the style, though I feel that its moving along nicely on its own and developing into itself now, suddenly things started fitting together and working out with other ideas. I've now been able to jump back into the design and layout and really work more straight and focused on these. This change in attitude and still persisting with work really opened my eyes to the process. What I learned: Don't get caught in tunnel vision!

So, now that I've jumped back on the saddle and am cruising along, I thought I'd share some of this process I'm going through. Basically, I took the text and started chopping it up (and I'm still going back to it now and then and fiddling with it here and there). Then I did a one page layout to help divide the text on each page and see how it would look. I then began thumbnails and sketches for the layouts. This was constantly edited, changed, rechanged, and still is.

After I get the preliminary ideas out, I will be reworking on character designing, making everything more perfect and then beginning into the coloring. Need to find the type of color schematics I want by first playing with the thumbnails and also coloring the characters so everything will connect and flow.









Finally, I worked off of the thumbnails and layouts and played with the sketches. (Actually, sometimes I did things the other way round because of certain ideas or pictures that I thought were more powerful in the mood or message). So, as I continue, I will start sending one sketch a week as you join me along this adventure. This is the first sketch of the turtle meeting the laid back fish in the kelp forest.