The Great Book Seminar Saga Part VI: What Now?

The Great Book Seminar Saga

Part VI: What Now?

...in which Lisa grosses everyone out before Thanksgiving...

Happy nearly Thanksgiving everyone! Best wishes for gatherings of family and friends and pumpkin pie!

Week eleven brought with it a couple of new paintings, a whole bunch of new sketches, and a wicked looking crawfish, and yet, no concrete work for week thirteen. (Wait, Lisa, didn't you skip week twelve? No, my mathematically-minded readers. Alas, alack, no Thursday Viktor class this week due to the tofurkey holiday.)

But no work? How can that be? you ask. How can you bring in four new sketches and not have any work to do for two weeks?

I shall explain, but first, the new finished work:

Final render of the porch scene. Double page spread.

Text-less double spread. The riverbank.

I have a little bit of tweaking to do on the riverbank scene. I may darken things up a bit. But for now, I'm happy with how it's working.

And now on to the sketches... I brought four new sketches to class:

The comments on the sketches were on target. The first is a bit too out-West-home-on-the-range for Bulgaria. The second, maybe too quiet. The scale in the third makes the crawfish look the same size as the boy... (Yegads! Crawfishzilla!) And the fourth? Not Viktor's cup of tea. Viktor suggested I look back in the story for my next sketches.

"How about the dugout scene?"

"You mean the one with the revolutionaries and the dead goat?"

Perfect picture book material, no?

Don't get me wrong... from my posts, you may get the impression that I don't like Viktor. Not true. I have been frustrated in this class, but the frustration is mostly self-directed. It has been a long haul figuring out new ways of working and trying to fit the project to my style and aesthetic. That being said, my work has evolved considerably since September, and Viktor has been a great help. He has an excellent eye, and his critiques are almost always fairly dead-on. However, there are moments when Viktor's aesthetic and my own don't necessarily overlap so well.

As to the sketches, I had hoped that I would have a few approved sketches to paint from during these two weeks, but instead, I had to take them back to the drawing board... Admittedly, I was a little frustrated leaving class last Thursday, so I put all of this class work aside. Sometimes it is just best to walk away... because when I finally returned to the sketches, I may have come up with a couple of new compositions that work even better than these originals!

But I shall leave you in suspense... you'll have to be patient. New sketches (and perhaps even a few finishes) next week!

I will, however, leave you with two presents.

The first... Prsenting Viktor (center), in yet another black t-shirt:


And:

Ewwww...

And thus ends Part VI and both week 11 and 12. Will Lisa draw more gigantic-creepy-crawly-roaches-of-the-river? Will she ink a sketch that (GASP!) hasn't been approved? And does Viktor own a t-shirt that isn't black? What will Part VII bring?

Find out! Next week!

The Great Book Seminar Saga Part II: The Picture Book

The Great Book Seminar Saga

Part II: The Picture Book

...in which Viktor lights a fire, and Lisa gets the heebie jeebies...

So you may be wondering how I pulled a picture book out of a story about war, death, and communist. There happens to be a brief but nostalgic flashback to the protagonist's childhood with his grandfather. SCORE! I essentially proposed to focus an entire semester (or at least the remaining 9 weeks of it) of work on perhaps half a page of text in which the protagonist visits his grandparents and goes crawfish hunting with his grandfather.

During class when I pasted all of this up on the wall for our weekly critique, Viktor gave me good feedback and then told me that I could conceivably begin the finals of the sketches and be done with the project IF I just wanted to do a simple fairytale-ish story... OR I could push them and make it into a SUPERB book. As he said to me, "I want to light a fire under your desk."

So I took all of it back to the drawing board... literally.

This is some of what I had from sketches round one:

Really rough opening page... the boy arriving at his grandparent's country home

Double page spread with text: Grandma and Grandpa and the boy on the porch watching the sun go down.

Double page spread with text: Grandpa and the boy heading out for some crawfish hunting.

Double page spread with text: arriving at the river.

I wrestled with the images for a week... how to push them? How to change things around and make it more dynamic?

One of the biggest problems with the originals (and a single night of work will do this) was the similarity in camera angle and setting. Not to mention Viktor wanted me to use reference to make it feel more real. "Too fairy tale-ish or story book fantasy land," was definitely a part of his comment. So I redid a bunch of the outdoor scenes with reference of Bulgarian villages... and I also started really thinking about my main character. Who is the little boy? What's he like?

Single page image: heading out for some crawfish hunting.

And speaking of crawfish... I had a vague idea of what a crawfish looked like. (My fourth grade class raised crawfish as our big science project... I think mine died a few weeks in...) In any case, I had a vague idea: lobster-ish, though smaller and grayer, and most definitely ugly. Anywho, I started googling crawfish for some reference for the scenes down by the river. Have you ever really looked at a picture of a crawfish? I mean, sat and stared at it? They are some seriously ugly little dudes. We're talking no-joke, giant-going-to-eat-your-face-off-underwater-bug ugly.

Shudder...

Despite my horror at the nasty wee beasties, the reference was good, and my sketches just got better. As did the camera angles. I also started playing with using smaller spot illustrations on the right side of the spread and small vignettes to surround the text on the left. They're still pretty rough, but they give me a good idea of where things are going.

Week six, I brought the new sketches back to class. Viktor's response: keep pushing it. So more sketches... not to mention he wanted to see examples of how the final illustrations would be rendered.

Back to the drawing board....

End Part II

Stay tuned for The Great Book Seminar Saga Part III: Final Renders or Style... huh?

...in which art school leads to nervous break downs and sketches of a mouse in a cowboy hat...