Children's book illustration class #1

Had my first class today with Lorette Broekstra. I got there a bit late! People were already doing there, 'Hello, my name is and I am here because' intros, so I missed a lot of them. Anyway, the class was quite good though some bits of it were 'review' for me. For instance, how a book is always multiples of 8 pages because of how it's bound. The endpapers, imprint page, and title page, etc.

One thing that was good though was we went through several children's books each to look at composition - to notice how some are all double page spreads, some single page with cameos, some with borders, some with vertical or horizontal drawing taking up part of the page, some with illustrative text, etc. etc. That was very good to go through quite a few all at the same time to see all the possibilities and of course it sparked ideas. It was very good too because Lorette had some of her books in the mix, so be able to look at something and ask 'why did you choose to do it this way?' was very insightful.

Our homework is to do a rough storyboard of a book. It can be our own idea, or it can be to reillustrate a book, or she also gave us the text of an unpublished book (i think) to illustrate if we can't find anything else. The one she gave us is quite visual already - It is called Things with Wings by Lisa Jacobson, and here is an excerpt:

Things with wings in outer space!
Aliens in Purple lace
flying past the silver stars
on their way to Planet Mars.

So it could be quite fun to try and come up with illustrations that aren't simply illustrating the text. I don't know, we'll see...

I'll post once I've done some storyboards. :-)