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Digital Limited Palette with Mary A Livingston Picture books are a glorious balance of story and illustration. Now, enter a third artistic element…digital presentation. By considering digital interpretation as an art, rather than embellishments or accessories, there is opportunity to add another dimension to the story. Just as an artist uses a limited color palette or as an author uses a limited number of words, a digital designer will do well to limit the digital enhancements when designing a digital picture book. The reasons to limit a digital palette are the same as for the art of writing and illustrating. It serves to bring focus to a point and distractions to a minimum. When choosing to animate, interact or amplify, consider the story first.
For comparison, I’ve chosen two digital picture book apps. COWZAT!, digital design by Colour Me Play and Prancing, Dancing Lily, digital design by Fat Red Couch. While there’s a clear difference in animation style, I’m only evaluating the palette of digital effects.  Animation and interaction notes for the first scene of COWZAT!, digital design by Colour Me Play. Author: Bruce Atherton. Illustrator Ben Redlich. The first scene of COWZAT!
The animations are elegant, smooth, and clever…but so numerous they interfere with the story flow. It becomes more like a cartoon than an interactive book especially since the narration will not turn off. The unrelated digital content is a distraction and the sheer number of actions overwhelms the story content.
The digital actions of Prancing, Dancing Lily don't interfere with the story. Each digital element has a place in the story. Some build on the existing illustrations, others add information. The temptation to show off animation skills and cram the screen with a gluttonous load of electronic gibber can snuff the life out of a story. While I appreciate the animation quality of COWZAT!, the digital designers of Prancing, Dancing Lily have respected the story by making appropriate enhancements. Digital design is part of an artistic triad for picture eBooks. The digital elements and interactivity should be included in the editorial process like the text and illustrations. Just as an author and illustrator must evaluate the relevance of specific words or imagery, the digital designer must consider if the animation or interactivity is pertinent to the specific story.
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 from the book, Just Like Me Cheat Please! OK, back to scooching ever closer toward the AuthorArtist position. Last month we took a break from the art and explored why Quantum Physics and being a children's book authorartist have everything to do with each other....so, how did it go? Did you become as clear as possible about what it is that you want to create in your career? Did you imagine it as if it's already happened? I encourage you to keep playing with those concepts from last month as we now turn back again toward some art making. This month I’m going to encourage you to cheatcheatcheat…now, I don’t really believe in cheating because of that whole second art rule of mine, “there’s never a right or wrong way to make art.” But technically, the kids always think of today’s project as cheating at first, until I educate them of course.  from Angels Ride Bikes To blow a big hole in the idea of cheating, I did a whole book using this photo technique - Angels Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems by Francisco Alarcon. I also used this technique for my contribution to Just Like Me, one of my all time favorite books. All you do is take a photograph, you can even use one of yourself or your kids to practice on, or someone you want to honor, like Nelson Mandela or Frida Kahlo and make art directly onto it. Enlarge the photo in black and white on heavy cardstock. I like to use oil pastels, color pencils or acrylics. With acrylics you can actually paint it to the point that you no longer see the original printed image. With oil pastels and color pencils part of what makes it interesting is that you can still see the photo print showing through.  Toyomi Igus Go slowly and let your colors build up. This is a great opportunity to get a sense of the shape of the face, how shadows work, facial expressions. You don’t have to be tied to making it look realistic. If you like you could be blue. Your kids could have polka dots. You could accentuate the most simple lines of the image and take out the smaller details and create a more stylized or graphic image. I’ve shared a few samples I did of two AMAZING authors I painted years ago for Children's Book Press promotional materials and recently found in my studio, Toyomi Igus and Juan Felipe Herrera. Can you see the image underneath? Does it feel like I’m cheating? What do you imagine I learned by doing this? Personally, I love this technique. I think of it as pure play and revel in the fact that I can relax and know that the image is basically going to look like the person.  Juan Felipe Herrera If your goal is to become an artist that can create realistic imagery, this is a great chance to practice, play and imagine doing this without an image underneath too. What or who would you love to paint using this technique? Your dog, your kid, your mum, your favorite artist…just promise me you’ll have fun. Thanks! Maya Gonzalez is largely self-taught. She has illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books and written 3 with, not an end in sight! Her latest book, Call Me Tree, set to come out this year with Lee&Low Books, is her most recent labor of love! Her fine art has shown internationally and appears in numerous books about the contemporary Chicano Art Movement including on the cover of Living Chicana Theory and Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education considered to be "the Bible of Chicano/a art." Ridiculously creative, she’s probably making art as you read this or thinking about making art if she’s driving a car or using the stove. And one of her ultimate passions is inspiring others to create books, because she believes that creating children's books has the potential to be one of the most radical things you can do!  Release into the Power of Play... Last month I encouraged you to:
Ok, so this month, we’re returning to the glory of cutting and pasting. I forever find myself returning to this brilliant game. And once I begin it’s so hard for me to stop. Just playing for a long moment for this demo had me all charged up and dying to investigate further. Paper and pencils, glue and scissors-freedom at my fingertips! Something happens when we play. Just like when we were children, when we play, we learn. Returning to the tools of childhood provide us with a familiar door back to the creative wisdom we were born with.  Gather Your Materials This project is a great way to begin playing with the empty page. Cut out a bunch of elements and then play puzzle with them. See how things look this way and that. Experiment with layering a figure into place. You don’t have to have the whole body figured out. You could have legs and arms, and a head and a body and move them around or cut more pieces until everything feels just right to you. Create characters, explore background, experiment with style, show movement. The sky’s the limit! You can see, I like big hair and big dresses! I have since I was a wee nibble. So you too get to do whatever YOU LIKE! Maybe it’s the thing you always drew when you were a kid, like mine is.  Cut out shapes and patterns from anything that strikes you I got a little fancy with the cutting part. I whipped out my trusty die cut contraption. I have a Cuttlebug, which I love (It's that green thing in the picture above). I love the circle dies. I have hearts and scalloped ovals, but there’s something about the circles. They’re so round :-). Only recently have I found out about the tools that exist because of the new craft genre of “scrapbooking.” I love discovering this whole new world where “scrapbook” is turned into a verb and through the transformation is elevated to crazy heights of fabulousness. A far cry from my old photos in cellophane pages in a cardboard binder. I warmed up for this project by cutting circles in colored paper. This got my imagination stirring. I had an old art journal and the ever collage-ready National Geographic, which I barely used. I went through each page, ripping out whatever caught my eye. The art journal turned out to be the best because it had all this patterned stuff, (which reminded me of the great paper you can get for scrapbooking.) I cut arm-ish looking limbs and boots and dresses and a wig or two. I cut more than I needed. I cut until I felt done cutting.  I laid all the elements out on a piece of paper and scooched them around until something fell into place. Sometimes I had to cut something else out. Then I glued everything down. I used color pencils, a permanent black marker and a white acrylic pen over everything and I decorated the sleeves by putting holes in them with my multiple size hole punchers! On the one I above that I fully finished, the face is construction paper and the ear is cut from the page of a dictionary. I had so much fun. I loosened up and relaxed. I played. It was awesome. In fact I had so much fun, I’m thinking I want to illustrate a book using this style now. My mind is exploding with ideas. Join me? Got paper, glue and scissors? Then freedom is yours! You are an artist. I know. P.S. Did you gather images last month? Did you scribble? Both of those things will come in handy with this project!!! And let me know how it goes! Here's some more samples from my playing...(click images to enlarge) Maya Gonzalez is largely self-taught. She has illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books and written 3 with, not an end in sight! Her latest book, Call Me Tree, set to come out next year with Lee&Low Books, is her most recent labor of love! Her fine art has shown internationally and appears in numerous books about the contemporary Chicano Art Movement including on the cover of Living Chicana Theory and Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education considered to be "the Bible of Chicano/a art." Ridiculously creative, she’s probably making art as you read this or thinking about making art if she’s driving a car or using the stove. And one of her ultimate passions is inspiring others to create books, because she believes that creating children's books has the potential to be one of the most radical things you can do! Perhaps you've been there. Written or created something wonderful on your computer and then your computer crashes and your work is lost either completely or for a long moment. That was my experience this week with my blog post. All set to post and then the "blue screen of death" appeared and the post, along with several other business files, now hibernates in computer space or perhaps gone forever...I'll find out on Monday. It's times like these when we are really stretched to surrender and let go into the creative flow because there's really no other choice. Always something to learn in these moments. Is it a powerful redirect, or is it something to test your resolve, or is it simply a practice in embracing the unknown as I talked about last month. Whatever the lesson, it is a powerful reminder to go with the creative flow of life and art. But since my post isn't happening as planned, I thought I'd offer a video from my online class that just started, Painting and Photo Collage, as a substitute. My original post was going to explore how anyone can illustrate their own work and begin to look at different techniques to make this happen, so in a way this video is a nice supplement. In this video I discuss the visual understory and symbolism that lends depth and meaning to the book I illustrated, Nana's Big Surprise, by Amada Irma Perez. I also begin to look at how the artwork was constructed. Enjoy the video and here's to going with the flow! Maya Gonzalez is largely self-taught. She has illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books and written 3 with, not an end in sight! Her latest book, Call Me Tree, set to come out next year with Lee&Low Books, is her most recent labor of love! Her fine art has shown internationally and appears in numerous books about the contemporary Chicano Art Movement including on the cover of Living Chicana Theory and Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education considered to be "the Bible of Chicano/a art." Ridiculously creative, she’s probably making art as you read this or thinking about making art if she’s driving a car or using the stove. And one of her ultimate passions is inspiring others to create books, because she believes that creating children's books has the potential to be one of the most radical things you can do!  I am about to embark on another illustrating adventure. Right now the art director is being set up. Text is being finalized. I’ll be doing sketches soon, based on the thumbnails and roughs I have already sent the publisher. It won’t be long before I’ll be painting. That’s funny. I just got a chill up my back and an old familiar feeling in my chest. It is an adventure. I am in it now. I can feel it. Creating a book is always a journey. Always something learned. Always an understory that layers into the art. This next book, which I wrote and will illustrate is LOADED with personal understory already. I can only imagine what all will have occurred by the time I have it in my hands in its final form. When I look back at all my books I can recall how I felt while I was creating each of them, what was going on in my life at the time. I can see how the art reflects that, whether I intended it to or not. I can see what was important to me and what compelled me. What I notice the most is how I illustrated many books based on what I needed in the classroom to teach art. Hilariously, in those days, I saw completed books more as tools, than as things unto themselves. I was focused on creating book art that kids could look at up close and figure out how to do, either with my help when visiting them, or on their own, like I would have done as a kid. I wanted to create techniques that were accessible, fun and familiar that a kid could successfully do and feel good about. Attending to book art in this way was F*U*N! I learned TONS and played like a maniac. I would just come up with a concept and decide that was it! Sometimes I was quite stretched to learn things fast enough to keep up with my own vision, but it kept me on my feet and always reminded me of how kids feel all the time—always in the unknown, always on an adventure learning fast as you gogogo. And now I know tons of cool, weird techniques that I just made up.  One of the first books I did like this was My Very Own Room by Amada Irma Perez. I LOVE introducing kids to oil pastels in the classroom, so of course, I had to do a book with them. But MY MY it was tricky business and fabulously messy! All the more reason to do it I guess! I still love the look of the rich textures and the originals I have continue to look fresh. Shipping them and storing them is delicate business however. But I highly recommend playing with them for illustrating. It was a good adventure. EVERYONE should play with oil pastels! If you’re getting dirty you know you’re making art I always say. Then there were things I heard in the classroom, conversations about someone “cheating” when making art. I was intrigued by this whole cheating concept and how incensed the kids would get about it. So I decided that I would try to cheat as much as possible in a book.  In Angel’s Ride Bikes and Other Fall Poems by Francisco Alarcon I decided that I would take photographs of all the humans and put those into my spreads instead of drawing them myself and only draw the environments around them. Then I painted across the whole spread. I even made a point of leaving visible paper edges where I glued the copied photos onto the larger paper so I could point out and say to kids, see here is where I glued it down. I have had some great conversations about cheating when I share this book. And I have watched a lot of kids feel easier about creating art when they know that even “an artist like me” makes art anyway she can and that’s a good thing. Art is art. No cheating possible. Making books with the classroom in mind has taught me well. Sometimes messy, sometimes deep. It’s good to know why we make books and that it is a journey, an adventure and many things big and small and mundane and profound are bound to be learned. I love the unknown. I love the surrender to a big, juicy project. I love the color and the smell of art materials and the prayers whispered between the layers to children I will never meet. Be strong. Belong. Be song. I love making books. We are a lucky crowd. Maya Gonzalez is largely self-taught. She has illustrated over 20 award-winning multicultural children’s books and written 3 with, not an end in sight! Her latest book, Call Me Tree, set to come out next year with Lee&Low Books, is her most recent labor of love! Her fine art has shown internationally and appears in numerous books about the contemporary Chicano Art Movement including on the cover of Living Chicana Theory and Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Art: Artists, Works, Culture and Education considered to be "the Bible of Chicano/a art." Ridiculously creative, she’s probably making art as you read this or thinking about making art if she’s driving a car or using the stove. And one of her ultimate passions is inspiring others to create books, because she believes that creating children's books has the potential to be one of the most radical things you can do! |
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