New Book and Lessons Learned

 I recently had the wonderful opportunity to Illustrate and design "A Girl Named Gitta,” a series of stories about the childhood of Brigitta Straumer Clyde.

I will be writing more about how I got the job, and why I chose to illustrate a self-published book in a future post. Here I want to share something I learned about the process of illustrating a book and meeting deadlines.

Yesterday, while discussing procrastination and burnout in one of my classes, a student of mine shared the idea that we should do the vanilla first and then make the banana split. As I thought about this profound statement about getting the basics done and then if you have time, you add the topping, I realized that is how I approached this book. 

In order to meet deadlines at a very busy time of my life, I got out the basics first. For example, in the image below I got the idea out. 

I wasn't happy with it. I knew it could be better, but I had to get something done. At this point I didn't know how to fix it, so I submitted the preliminary black and white image. At this point this was one of my least favorite pages. The authors were happy with it, but I knew it could be better. 

Once I was finished with the line drawing for the whole book, I went in and reworked my least favorite images. This was the result.

I then went on to the next image I was not happy with and found a better solution. I used this process until each page was at a point I could be happy with. 

So, if you are overwhelmed with too much to do, do the basics first. Then if you have time, add the good stuff.

 

Vermont Animation Festival

On March 25 and 26 Northern Vermont University will be hosting the Annual Vermont Animation Festival. You can find out more about the event at vtanimationfestival.org

I also found out that one of my animations was accepted into the festival!