Attack of the ART 210

A spread from s.britt’s Over in the Hollow.

Big fun project time! Next, you’re creating a children’s book (or parts of one, anyway). The writing’s been done, so it’s up to you to communicate something about the characters and the story using your personal style.

Project 3: Children’s Book Illustration

Choose a story from one of the six below. Using the linked text, illustrate part of the story in two spreads (four pages).

• Little Red Riding Hood
• Three Billy Goats Gruff
• The Emperor’s New Clothes
• Jack and the Beanstalk
• Hansel and Gretel
• Rapunzel

The cover of s.britt’s School Years album.

In addition to the two spreads, you’ll create a front cover, a back cover, a spine, a title page, and patterned endpapers for your children’s book.

Go crazy with this one. Bring your skills from other areas of art and design: painting, cut paper, collage, 3-D modeling—about anything. Then, when you bring your work into Photoshop and Illustrator, you’ll finish with a great, complex piece.

Inspiration links!

• the “children’s books” tag on Drawn.
• Vintage Children’s Books, a Flickr group.
• Children’s book illustrators and authors, a Flickr group.
• Retro Kid, a Flickr group.
• S. Britt
• A set of Mary Blair illustrations. And another.
• John Manders.

Timeline

Thursday, October 22

Before class, upload 6 children’s book inspiration images to the Flickr group. Bring your character designs to class. We’ll refine those, and start thumbnailing your spreads.

Tuesday, October 27

Before class, refine your final character designs and choose your final layout for the cover, spine, back cover, and two spreads. Upload images of these to the Flickr group, and we’ll talk about them in class.

Thursday, October 29

Upload your completed (or near-completed) cover, spine, back cover, and spreads to the Flickr group for discussion in small groups. Work on your endpapers and title page.

Tuesday, November 3

Upload your final pieces to the Flickr group for an in-class critique. This will be your last chance for making small refinements!

Thursday, November 5

All pieces are due at the beginning of class: printed, mounted, with your name sticker on the back.

Remember, there are a billion different ways to do this. Figure out what works for you.

1. Scan your inked art at 600 ppi and save as a TIFF.
2. Drag the TIFF onto this droplet to make everything pure black and white.
3. Image → Mode → RGB (the droplet turns everything into greyscale)
4. Select All, Copy
5. Create a new channel, click on it, Paste
6. Click back on RGB in the channels palette so your alpha channel isn’t the only thing selected.
7. Select → Load Selection… → choose “Alpha 1” in the dropdown, check “Invert”
8. Double-click the “Background” layer and name it to make it editable.
9. Click the little “create mask from channel” button in the layers palette. Ta-da! Black lines only!
10. Create a new layer (white?) for the background
11. To color the lines, create a new layer on top of the line art layer and press Cmd-Opt-G to group it with the line art, then color as sloppily as you like.
12. To do fills or background color, make new layers beneath the line art layer.

Here’s the scanning tutorial I did in class Tuesday. Pretty straightforward. Ask me if anything’s unclear.

The screenshots here show Photoshop CS4 and OS X 10.6. Some descriptions might be slightly different for older versions of the software, but the basic ideas carry over.

1. Use Image Capture. Scanner drivers are notoriously unreliable, and in most situations OS X’s Image Capture is a simpler, faster way to go. It’s part of every OS X installation, so you don’t have to worry about installing it.
2. Place your artwork on the scanner pane before you start Image Capture, because it automatically does an overview scan when it starts. Why waste that precious time?
3. Adjust the selection box to fit your artwork. Or, if you’re scanning multiple pieces of a large drawing, scan the whole platen. That way, you don’t have to do an overview scan for every piece.
   
4. I set the resolution to 150 for thumbnails and reference art, and 600 for anything that will survive in the final piece.
5. Here are the other default settings I like to use:
   
   I don’t try to massage the image here—it’s easier to change levels, crops, and whatnot in Photoshop.
6. Hit scan. Image Capture will automatically number the filenames of multiple scans.

If you have a large drawing, you can scan it in as many pieces as you need, and let Photoshop stitch them together. No more giant scanners! Just make sure each piece overlaps the ones next to it a bit.

1. In Photoshop, select File → Automate → Photomerge…
2. Select your scanned files, and set Photomerge to “Reposition” so it doesn’t try any perspective oddness.
   
3. Watch Photomerge do its thing, then marvel at the automatic layer masking.
   
4. If everything worked out, select Layer → Flatten image…
5. Save!

A meaty, two-week project at last! Time to flex your design muscles!

Project 2: Modern WPA Poster

Design for mankind! During the USA’s last big economic troubles, the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Art Project employed thousands of artists to communicate the government’s hopeful outlook to the citizens. Posters like the one above were posted in stores, bus stops, public offices to tell people, “Things will get better. Here’s how to help!”

A few years ago, ReadyMade magazine asked some modern designers to create their takes on WPA posters for today’s America. We’ll be doing the same thing.

Your task: use Illustrator and Photoshop to design an 18” × 24” WPA-style poster for the modern age. Choose a social cause that’s relevant, and clearly communicate it in the style of the vintage posters. Show us which one poster most influenced your design—but don’t just copy it!

Links for inspiration:

• Two articles about the WPA.
• The Library of Congress’s WPA poster archive
• ReadyMade’s “Poster Children”.

Timeline

Tuesday, October 6

Introduction to the project. Research in class. By Thursday, read the linked articles and e-mail a brief summary to me, along with your thoughts about the WPA and how its goals are relevant today. Bring 10 thumbnails of your poster concepts to Thursday’s class.

Thursday, October 8

Continue to upload your progress to the Flickr group. In-class critique.

Tuesday, October 13

Save every version you work on, and upload each to Flickr for the rest of us to critique online.

Thursday, October 15

Bring a small print of your poster for an in-class critique.

Tuesday, October 20

Final poster due.