Afishionados,
June 4th doth approacheth quick, and with it the portfolio show that I’ve mentioned in previous posts. I am happy to say that I am well ahead of schedule because I did a boatload of printing on Saturday instead of going to Cleveland to watch the Indians lose to the Yankees.
My portfolio will have several different pieces, but my favorite is the most ambitious assignment that I’ve undertaken my whole time at school. Everyone has similar projects because everyone has taken the same classes. While I, too, am using some of these “cookie cutter projects” in the show, I needed something that was completely my own that nobody else would have. So I wrote, illustrated, and bound a children’s book. And I think it came out rather well, if I do say so myself. I titled the book The Mysterious Misadventure of Bella J. Teagarden. Here’s what the jacket looks like:

And the synopsis from the inside of the jacket:
Bella J. Teagarden is sent to her room for a nap when the strangest things begin to happen. First, an ugly bird shows up at her window and flies Bella and her cat, Jynx, off to a strange island in the middle of the sea. An encounter with pirates, a cave of treasure, a dragon, and a rusty old robot. How is Bella supposed to take a nap through all of that, let alone find her way back home?
In the book, Bella is six years old and is based on my real life three-year-old niece of the same name. The character is based off the real Bella’s attitude and behaviors. No one has a cooler niece than I do. You may think that you do, but you would be wrong.
The first step was to actually write the story. I wrote the whole thing in a couple of days and, after three revisions, was happy with the overall tale. As with any story, cuts had to be made and characters were dropped because of length. However, there is always the possibility of a sequel, and I already have a good idea on how I want to treat that as well should one ever come about.
From there, the concept began with a sketch of what I wanted Bella to look like in the story. A large head, comical hair, and a simplistic, almost two-dimensional appearance is what I wanted. And she needed a badass dress, but more on that later. I also began to sketch the “sets” for the story. Characters were designed separately so that I could place them wherever I wanted within the scenery. The first set was Bella’s room, where the story begins.
The sketch of Bella’s room:

That sketch was scanned and brought into Adobe Illustrator, a software program for drawing vector images. I traced the shapes in the sketch, and put each shape on its own layer. The colors were not important, other than to make it easier for me to distinguish one shape from the next. Here’s what the vector version of her sketch looked like:

From there, the vector image was exported into Adobe Photoshop, where I applied textures, colors, and adjusted the lighting as necessary. The finished room, as it appears in the storybook:

The book contains approximately 6 images (all done the way I mentioned above) and 12 pages of text. I would love to have done a few more pictures, but I simply ran out of time. I don’t think that the story suffers from a shortage, but there are a few things that I would have liked to have been able to draw. Ah, well, perhaps in the Collector’s Edition.
Now, about Bella’s dress that I mentioned earlier. I used a placeholder texture (a nice pink plaid) when I first designed Bella, but someone suggested that I make the cover out of cloth, at which point I thought I’d make the cloth cover match Bella’s dress. Thanks to the beauty of Photoshop, swapping textures is a breeze.
Originally, I went to Joann Fabrics in search of a nice plaid but found something even better. Because of Bella’s no fear attitude and because the story involves pirates, I chose an awesome pink pirate pattern instead. Awesome!
Joann Fabrics is not exactly a place where men go to buy things. I was the only guy in the whole store and I was carrying a pink pirate pattern to the counter. The woman who cut it for me looked at me very suspiciously and asked me what I was going to do with it. I told her that I kept little girls in my windowless basement but they kept outgrowing their dresses and that it was time to make new ones and feed the girls less food. She didn’t talk to me after that.
And speaking of pirates, guess who makes an appearance in the story? (Used with permission, too! Thanks, JP!)

Once the pages for the book were printed, my mother was kind enough to stitch them together for me with her sewing machine. I cannot thank her enough for her help, because my original plan of using book glue wasn’t working out well at all. The stitching came out even better than I could have hoped for.

And a photo of the first image in the book, as well as the first page of the story. The book ended up being a nice cloth hardcover, complete with dust jacket. Finished size is approximately 8″ x 10″.

I even created a “Bella-ized” version of myself for the “About the Author” section on the jacket. I actually drew my own hair from scratch, but the filter I used in Photoshop generated almost the exact same pattern as Bella’s. Must be genetics I guess.

So there you have it. A sneak peak at my completed book and the reason I’ve been AFK from the blogosphere for so long.