An Epilogue, for Now

I thought it might never get here, but the academic year is finally coming to a close. And not just the year, but my entire time as a student at Winthrop; even more shocking, my entire time as an enrolled student, period.

It’s the end of a season. And it’s pretty cool to think about, honestly. On my dedication page in my senior thesis, I wrote a short message to my first grade teacher. I was an enthusiastic “artist” from a very young age, and I very clearly remember 16 or 17 years ago when she said to me, “I just know I’ll see your name on a children’s book in a bookstore one day, illustrated by Corrie Bates!” Granted, The Appropriate Pirate isn’t chilling out on a shelf in Barnes & Noble or anything, but I think it’s really, really cool that I got to close out my entire school career by bringing it full-circle and creating a children’s book that’s for sale somewhere.

As for this year’s updated thesis process, I’m incredibly grateful for it. In my first semester at Winthrop, I was dreading the senior thesis (sometimes I think ahead a little too far) because of the stories I’d heard of a 20-page academic paper that would have to go along with the actual project I’d want to make. Having all of that change worked out incredibly well for me. Writing is a natural outlet for me, but when I have to stuff my thoughts into professional-sounding academic phraseology and include references and proper research, it can be a much more trying ordeal. I loved the freedom the blogging format offered, and I may continue this blog in the future, though I’m sure it’ll undergo a name change and its purpose will be slightly different.

I don’t really have anything else to compare this thesis experience to, so I’m not sure where else to take this post. I’m glad we didn’t have scathing critiques, though I probably could’ve benefitted from harder deadlines and some form of critique on my work. And there were aspects of the process that I found frustrating. Mostly the fact that my finished thesis is based exactly on the very first idea for AP that I talked about in this blog, and I wasted a good six months trying to put together different ideas for a more complex story when I really should’ve stayed with my original plans all along. Don’t get me wrong–I think there are benefits that come from leaving your initial ideas and exploring more options. But this process has taught me that sometimes, I just need to learn how to trust my gut when I think I have a really good idea, and also differentiate between what IS a really good idea, and what only sounds good on the surface and truly does need more creative exploration.

I don’t feel like those long months of no motivation and writing frustration were a waste of time, though. I still learned a lot, mostly about how I work, how my creative process functions, how long it takes me to burn out and start learning a new hobby (around 5 days of straight work), how many movies I can watch in one night (five, but two of those were about 4 hours long), and how many Google image searches for pirate references will yield only Pirates of the Caribbean photos (all but one. Not even kidding). And I was able to finish everything on time, in spite of myself.

Ultimately, I’m really pleased with the entire experience, and I hope to take the things I’ve learned here and apply them to my future illustrative endeavors. It’s been a good run. The end!

Final Presentation

 

So I finished my thesis, and something like eight hours later, I was standing in the school’s movie theater auditorium giving a speech about it. It was a pretty cool experience, I guess. At this point (that was over a week ago), the speech is all sort of a blur; I don’t really remember exactly what I said or how I said it. I just did it. Which is more or less how I’ve approached every public speaking opportunity since high school. I wasn’t super nervous and the size of the auditorium didn’t really affect me. I thought it was kind of nice to get out of moldy McLaurin 352, and it was definitely cool to show my work to a (slightly) larger body of people. I did get approached by a couple of people at the end, who were saying things like, “I’d love to have a copy for my (insert tiny child relative here),” which I thought was pretty cool! No one actually purchased any copies, and I didn’t have a method for that anyways; I’m holding off on the selling until I get my proof (which should be here in the mail TODAY I am so excited).

So yeah. Overall, it was a good experience. I’d do it again.

The In-Class Presentation

Several weeks ago, before I even finished my thesis, I gave an in-class presentation on what my thesis was about. It was all in preparation for this big event the VCOM Department of Design was doing this year, where all of us seniors present our theses to an audience in a fancy auditorium. So I presented my speech in class that day, and while my delivery was mostly fine, I made a good deal of changes to the speech itself. I was talking a lot about my process, decisions I chose not to make, directions I could’ve gone but didn’t, inspirations that fell by the wayside, et cetera. I was told to stop telling the audience what the book was not, and to tell them what it is, instead.

So I did that. I revamped my speech to include a lot more about the characters and the story itself, as well as the illustrations, and I left an ounce of process-talk. Deleting all of the unnecessary parts came fairly easily to me once I had my mind wrapped around the audience I was supposed to present to–I guess all of my years in the VCOM program have me trained to talk about mistakes I’ve made and the reasons why I made one design choice and not another, instead of just taking my work at face-value from the point of view of an audience member, and really, both points of view are necessary for an illustrator or designer to consider. It was a valuable learning experience.

Up next: The Presentation Day, or, In Which I Talk Very Quickly, As I Always Do, Especially When Giving Speeches.

Hey Friends, Here’s an Update (or Five).

I’m gonna rapid-fire a few blog entries, here.

I haven’t updated in a while, because I’ve been incredibly preoccupied and busy. Why’s that, you might ask? Well, my senior thesis is officially complete! I sent it to the printer a little over a week ago (March 29th), and I should be getting my first proof of the book tomorrow (I’ll edit this entry with a photo when I do get it).

I’m really excited to have it finished. I feel really good about where the book ended up, story and illustration-wise, in spite of all of the troubles I had with writing it and finding the motivation to work on it. The work itself ended up being a lot of fun; I spent my Spring Break practically living in my studio doing nothing but watercoloring. A week or so passed after that and I had to fight through some more motivation problems, but in the final week I was able to finish all of my drawings, finish watercoloring all of the illustrations, stay awake and relatively alert for 36 hours, sleep for another 12, and then pull another ultra-late night making the final touches and preparing my presentation. It’s done!

The book is for sale on Blurb.com’s marketplace, and can be found here. I’m waiting a bit to promote it seriously; I want to make sure the proof looks alright before I spread it around and beg for people to buy it from me. But this at least gives you an idea of the cover and the preview pages inside!

More to come!

Peer Critique, and What Happens When You Hit a Wall Hard Enough

On February 17th, I had a peer critique of the work I’d finished thus far for my senior thesis. I showed roughly two spreads to the class and got a bit of feedback. And then I decided to turn my project upside down.

Let me back up a little bit. My last post here talked about how much trouble I’d been having with writing the story. And I thought I was about to make some headway, but in fact, I was not going to make any headway at all. By the time I had my critique, I still had no real story ideas, and I was just completely stuck. So it was suggested to me that I return to my original idea that I talked about in a very old post, making a very simple book using a back-and-forth, opposites structure to teach good manners to children. I sort of went around my elbow to get to my nose on that one, but that’s the new/old course I’m following, and I’m gonna follow this one through. So that’s good news!

Anyways, back to the critique. My original idea for this project was to illustrate it entirely in watercolor. I changed my mind somewhere along the way and decided to illustrate it digitally, since I thought it would be a faster method. I managed to get one small piece out of this before the critique, and for the sake of beautiful contrast (you’ll see what I mean in a moment), here it is:

Yikes.

Granted, it’s unfinished and was quickly done, but clearly my skills do not lie in using the computer as a drawing medium. It’s just no fun for me. The concept was generally well-accepted in critique though, so I left feeling pretty okay about things and ready to get down to business and do some hard labor over the next few weeks.

That didn’t really happen. Every time I sat down to work, I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated, frequently erasing mistakes I was making and having a hard time seeing what I was doing on my 13″ computer screen. I started to get more and more unmotivated, and was actually starting to loathe the idea of bringing this project to completion. And then I reached my breaking point, which actually turned into a breakthrough (which is, for the record, what happens when you hit a wall hard enough–you burst through it).

Yep. I’m doing my project in watercolors.

I thought through everything, and I realized that I actually work fairly quickly in watercolors. At least, I certainly work more quickly there than I do when trying to draw digitally. It sounds stupid, but I feel 110% more connected to a piece I’m working on if I’m actually working pencil-to-paper on it, rather than stylus-to-tablet. And I don’t mean “connected” in a weird, artsy-fartsy way, I literally just mean I have so much more control over the placement of each element on the page if I’m just straight up working with my hands. I get things done faster, I don’t have to worry about image resolution, and my pencil is guaranteed to put a line exactly where I want it to be every single time. As soon as I made my decision, my excitement level for the project actually started rising, and the simple act of pulling out watercolor paper and drawing some guidelines on it made me feel like I was actually an illustrator again, and not just a final-semester college student with a horrid case of senioritis.

So for the last few days, I’ve been working on my pencils, which I hope to have finished by next week. I’ll start in on the watercoloring soon after that. I don’t foresee myself getting a lot of sleep in the near future, but I also don’t foresee myself being tempted to give up and drop out anymore either, so that’s nice. Today, I took one of my pencils and worked it up in watercolors, and I’m really quite pleased with the result:

Remember that bit about contrast? Yeah. I'm so much more comfortable with traditional media.

So yeah! That’s been my life as a VCOM senior for the last two weeks. It’s about to get pretty crazy, and I have a lot to get done in the span of about two weeks, but I’m happy to say that I’m actually excited to be back on track here.

An Instructor Meeting, and How I Did Homework in Church

So last time I was here, I talked a little bit about my story, and how I’ve really been struggling with it.  And that was the main topic of conversation in my instructor meeting on Friday. Basically, my problem is that I have way too much going on, and I need to narrow it down to one plot line. Which is doable.  And I also need to make the story more relatable by giving the characters something a little more tangible to want. We discussed a few story options, and I spent the weekend mulling them over but making little progress, since I was out of town this weekend helping to throw a wedding shower for my brother’s fiancée. I had a lot of content to pull together, but nothing was really coming to form in my mind. To put some imagery to it, my ideas felt like bubbles that were floating around and not really coming together at all and then floating farther apart and popping before I could really wrap my mind around them. I just didn’t have the time or energy to reel everything in.

Fast forward to Sunday morning. My church started a fabulous series this week called Living a Better Story, and it’s based on this amazing book called A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, written by one of my favorite writers, Donald Miller. To give a (very) quick synopsis, it’s basically about living a story that’s worth telling. And so I’m sitting backstage taking notes and all of the sudden, Pastor Furtick reads a sentence from the book that defines, essentially, what a story is:

“A story happens when a character wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.”

And all of the sudden, everything zoomed into focus. OH. My characters in this story don’t really want anything, and if they do, what they want isn’t important enough to make it a good story.  They need to want something, and they need to overcome conflict to get it. When it’s put that way, it’s so simple. So I think I’m gonna go with the following route: Appropriate Pirate has friends (this will be established within the first 2-3 pages), becomes prideful and bossy because of how “good” he is, loses friends because of it, and has to change his attitude, swallow his pride, and reconcile himself with his fellow pirate friends. The end!  Now I just have to write it, make it at least 20 pages (32 is but a dream at this point), and start knocking out those spreads.

 

A Wild Mock-Up Appears!

So I’ve been giving my Appropriate Pirate children’s story a little more thought, a little more work, and a little more form, and while I still haven’t gotten the entire story down yet, it’s beginning to take shape in my head.  This is encouraging, given the fact that the writing process has been something of a struggle for me. It’s funny, because for a time near the beginning of my college career, I had full intentions of being an English minor. Literature (and literary analysis) has always been a smaller passion of mine, and I had an English teacher suggest to me once that I ought to consider looking into having an English minor, since it really would be a good fit for understanding the Story and how it fits into illustration (which is, naturally, all about Story). I was a big fan of this idea until I realized my workload as an illustrator simply wouldn’t allow it, but I took enough English classes to get fully acquainted with the mechanisms of a story and how storytelling works, why it works, and what makes it strike a chord in us.

That being said, I am just not very good at writing stories. Writing this children’s book has been a huge challenge, particularly in the sense that I am trying to keep it on a children’s reading level while getting grandiose ideas about character development. I keep having to remind myself that this isn’t Lost or Lord of the Rings, it’s a book for children about a pirate with Very Good Manners, and while I do have some nice themes planned out, I need to keep myself on track so that I don’t make this a whole lot harder than it has to be.

So that’s in the works, but what’s also in the works is my vision for how this book is going to look, and this part is exciting to me.  This was another major challenge, because I got a small case of creative burnout after last semester. For a week or two, I was working on thumbnails for the parts of the story that I already had planned out. And I hated every. Single. One of them. The compositions for the page spreads were boring, too symmetrical, not dynamic enough; the colors I had in mind were equally boring and “expected,” I guess, and basically I just had a terribly difficult time getting things to work out for me. I’m still having a bit of trouble working things out, but on the plus side, I worked up a mock-up for one of the spreads, and I really am pleased with the composition, color choices, and character designs. Here it is:

Naturally this is a very sketchy version that’s pretty sloppy in a lot of ways, but it gets across the colors I’m looking for, as well as the textures.  I’ve decided, by the way, that I won’t be doing this in traditional watercolors, as I originally planned. That would take me far too long, and I simply don’t have that much time before the due date.  Instead, it’s going to be all digital, with watercolor textures added for effect. I’m a little bit bummed about that, because I love working with watercolors and bought a super awesome Kolinsky Sable brush (for 50% off, whaaat!) just for the occasion, but I’m sure I’ll be able to use that down the road. I also bought a new Wacom Intuos4 to replace my dead or dying Intuos2, so hey, at least something’s getting used!

Anyways, that’s all for today. Until next time!

Back to the Grind!

Well friends, the break is long over and my final semester has begun. How would you like to see a list of all of the things I accomplished over the break?

Amazing, right?  I was so productive!  Of course, by “productive,” I mean “totally out of my element, busy, and unable to find a spare moment or desk space to do any work at all.”  Though I did make this rockin’ book cover for my dad:

Anyways, what was I doing over my break?  Mostly working at my job, but also taking care of the other reason why I got approximately zero things done.  My home-life is not currently conducive to doing much in the way of illustration, book-planning, or even thinking.  Because those things are hard to do when this is jumping on you every few minutes:

Yes, we're fully aware of how adorable she is.

Meet Daphne, the newest addition to my household. She’s a nearly six-month-old border collie/pomeranian mix, has the energy of a thousand small children, and the attention span of less than one. She’s the cutest thing you will ever see, but if you ever try to write a children’s book around her, she simply won’t allow it and will decide to pee on the floor instead.

This was my life over break. It’s time to get back to work.

Inspiration and Influence: The Sequel

I had a thought a few weeks ago that kind of weirded me out.  For my senior thesis, I’m writing for children for the first time ever, really.  And it dawned on me that all of the sudden, I have the ability to impart to kids at a young age the kind of message I want them to hear, whatever that may be.  Whatever ideas I think are important for the next generation to understand, I can write (and have written–see my last entry) into my story.  Naturally, this also comes with a pretty big responsibility to share good messages and ideas, but having that responsibility feels pretty huge.  Also weird, since it wasn’t that many years ago that I was the kid reading children’s books that had more to say about life than what sometimes appeared on the surface.  And I haven’t really forgotten them.

Case in point:  Shel Silverstein, who’s going to be the inspiration/influential artist/writer for this week’s blog entry.  I devoured his poetry books as a kid like they were candy, and I remember reading them over and over again.  His illustrations are so simple–just pen drawings (my thesis will be more than just pen drawings, promise)–but they really say a lot and get emotions across that you just wouldn’t expect from such a simple drawing.  The same goes for his writing.  It’s often equally simple as his drawings, but just as profound as Shakespeare.

Take, for example, this story of his that I actually just found the other day:  The Missing Piece Meets the Big O.

Click through to read the story; someone appears to have posted it somewhere.

I had never read this story before until I found it yesterday, after reading a relatively lengthy article on Shel Silverstein that inspired me.  Basically, Silverstein was the kind of person who thought that the way children’s books were (well, are) written was embarrassing, and spent too much time talking down to kids instead of being fun to read (or having any point at all).  Instead of just complaining about the state of the industry, though, he set out to change it, and wrote books that are still cherished by children and adults alike.  That being said, when I read this story, it pretty well blew me away (not unlike The Giving Tree or any of Silverstein’s other wonderful books).  It’s basically a story about relationships (familial, platonic, romantic, etc.), told metaphorically through the imagery of a Missing Piece.  The whole thing is so simple, but it’s really quite profound, and has a message that everyone, regardless of age, can relate to in some way.  It really impressed me that he could say so much with so few drawn lines and so few words.

Now, I’m not going to throw my artistic style out the window to make it ultra simplistic or anything, but the simplicity in Silverstein’s work really inspires me.  If I can manage to tell a simple story though pictures and words and have it be that profound, I will have succeeded in making this book.  Clearly I don’t think I’m going to be at Shel Silverstein’s level by the end of the semester, but his work is definitely going to be an inspiration for me while I’m working through this project.

In other news, no updates on Appropriate or Inappropriate Pirate art just yet!  I’m working on it, but I’ve been ultra busy lately.  Hopefully by the time I’m writing next week’s entry, I’ll have something to show for it. XD

Thoughts on a Story

I’m updating again!  I have a couple of sketches uploaded (more sketches finished, but these are the ones I have scanned), as well as some thoughts on story ideas.  I’ll start with the story, and leave the sketches for the end, so you have to read the whole entry to see them.  Ha! (I guess you could just scroll down if you were that interested, but honestly they aren’t much to look at yet, so read the blog instead. XD)

So I started really brainstorming some story ideas last week, and I have a pretty good direction now!  That’s exciting, because previously, literally all I had was “Appropriate Pirate does this, and Inappropriate Pirate doesn’t do this!  How funny is that?!” for 22-32 pages.  You don’t have to be Dr. Seuss to realize that doesn’t work well. XD  So what I’ve got now is this:  For the first six or so pages, I’ll focus on introducing the characters of Appropriate Pirate and Inappropriate Pirate (henceforth referred to as AP and IP, for the sake of my fingers), two pirate friends, to the reader.  This is going to follow the “AP does this, IP does not do this” formula I mentioned earlier (it’s funnier when it’s shorter, yeah? Yeah!).

Throughout this introduction, though, I plan to gradually show AP’s increasingly distasteful reactions to IP’s actions.  Once establishing this, I’m going to show that AP is getting/has become haughty about how he is so much better than IP, and how he would never stoop so low to doing the terrible things that IP is always doing!  Because of this line of thinking, AP becomes more prideful in his dealings with other people, and it begins to show.  Other people begin to like him less because of how much better he thinks he is, and IP simply continues to be his inappropriate self whenever he and AP cross paths.

At some point in the story, AP and IP will have some sort of clash with one another.  I haven’t quite decided what this will be yet, but it’ll very likely have something to do with the story points I’ve listed previously.  But basically, both of them will immensely hurt one anothers’ feelings by their actions, and they will both realize something about themselves.  AP will realize how prideful he’s become, and that he’s really no better than IP.  IP, having hurt AP’s feelings, will realize that he doesn’t want to be so mean anymore, and wants to change for the better!  The two of them will make up at some point and become even better friends: AP will become humbled, and IP will become more selfless.  I’d like to rename them, since their names (at the moment) are built around their personalities, and giving them new names will be sort of symbolic to their new start as changed individuals.  I’m just not sure what sort of names I want to give them.  So I’ll be thinking about that over the next week!

Anyways, time for the pictures!  These are really only background characters that I plan to use in the illustrations.  Featured here is a pirate wench, the Captain, and a couple of shipmates:

So yeah!  That’s all for this entry.  Next time I’ll have some pictures of Appropriate Pirate and Inappropriate Pirate themselves, and I’ll talk about some interesting thoughts I’ve had on writing a children’s book.  Exciting!