A Fun Exercise for Creating Picture Books

1. Introduction: Hi, everyone. My name is Laura. I'm a Children's writer, illustrator and profit maker. Among various projects, I wrote and illustrated the Children's book up Stellar Space, Best Dark Fables, hoping Cat books and Children's books and holds Book of Dance and Go Gold Golden Garland. Welcome to my second class on skill share. If on exercise for praising picture books, you can find many classes, no skill share on making picture books. And I really recommend having a look at these classes as well as they have great technical and practical information. But for this, plus, I will skip over the counties and jumping picture books are generally purchase pages. It's kind of an industry standard, a sweet spot for pricing printing on. It's a good back four to enter for the purpose of this class of ever, we won't be creating a full length picture book. Think of this clothes is an exercise, a warm up to a picture book making. So today we will create a short picture story like this one. After completing this assignment, you can always expand on your story and create a full length feature book. I put the template for the nine panel page in the Project Gallery, so feel free to use it. Now. Let's start writing. I sorry 2. Story: for this assignment, you have a couple of options to write your story. You can either simplify a traditional fairytale to fit the nine panels, or you can write your own story. Just remember, a story traditionally has a beginning introduction bits and middle bit, where a conflict is introduced and at ending with a resolution. But I'm a big fan of breaking the rules, so really anything goes as long as the end result is good, fun or interesting. Children love stories with characters that they can identify with, so it is a good idea to make your character a child or someone with the childish personality. However, a Children's book character doesn't always have to be a human. In fact, having animals or fantastical made up creatures is your characters could be even more identifiable for kids off all races and genders. So let's think of a story like him rebels to seize Your story can be about the character who loves to do or not to do something, and it can become the conflict or your character could be an animal. The conflict could come from what type of animal this it's the finding. Features could be a problem like, for instance, a draft could find it hard to find a scarf that wraps up all of her neck. Or lion could be embarrassed by the little fluffy bit off his tail because he wants a full bushy tail like a fox, and you can build a story up from this. So let's say I want to write about the goat because you know, they're very underrated. What's the most defining feature off a goat? I'd say haunts. He could be unable to do something because the horns get in the way, like wearing hats. So let's start putting down the skeleton off our story first, less introduced a goat on the first frame. Let's call him Billy Se. Really? Gold wants to look cool. He sees another animal wearing hats, maybe a rooster wearing a fedora. He looks like Ventress, then really tries on fedora. He looks silly, of course. Then we can continue this pattern like Billy sees Rabbit wearing A very she looks artistic . Billy tries on the Barre. It stretches on his horns. Then Billy sees Peak with a bowler hat. He looks so sophisticated Billy tries on the bowler hats. It can get stuck between his hones. Billy get sad. He gives up. But then he finds a pair of sunglasses and hey is the coolest off the mall. Now try writing your own story, and once you're done, we'll move on to the next part character design. 3. Character Design: I like to do my initial sketches on paper or directly into appropriate or for the shop, so it just shows what works for you. So I have my reference pictures that I found online here. A good trick for character design is to base it on someone you know. It can be a famous person, your hairdresser, friends or even yourself. It instantly adds life into your character to have someone in mind when designing it for my story. I want the sort of hard done by look for my good character, and the first name that pops into my mind is Michael Cera. So I'll play around with that idea and get some sketches ready. First time sketching Michael Cera trying to understand his features like the guys that are close to each other, every mouth onda around it. Then I simplify his design on base. My goat design on this. Once you have all your character designs ready, it is time to go onto the next stage 4. Colour: it's a good idea to come up with the color palette for your picture book. A limited color palette will establish a sense of coherence in style throughout your illustrations. There are a lot of classes on solitary on skill share and online, so I won't go into it. But another great source off color is the color provision, known as killer at color dot adobe dot com. You can important image that you took or found on Pinterest or Google to pick colors from it. You can't specifically pick the colors you want from your reference picture. You can even change the mood. It picks the colors and such as colorful brides, muted, solemn. Or you can go to color wheel on Pick your palate within the color harmony of your choice. You can even go to explore to find a pre created color palette by other users, which you can search by theme like sunset or sad. So pick a color palette that you like, and that fits your story. You can expand or limit your color palette is you like See you on the next video 5. Model sheet: to drive a model she ate for a stronger character in 3/4 were then drove horizontal lines from certain points, like under defeat, where the neck meets the torso on top off the head, etcetera. Then keeping within these guidelines draw your character from the front side and behind. Now, to do this step or not is up to you. You can very well carry on without making a model sheet off your practice, but especially if you need to draw your character in a lot of different positions, this will be quite useful. See you on the next video. 6. Environment: when illustrating the backgrounds, you can be very minimalistic in rebel to seize. And Goldilocks. I wanted to make the whole thing in a few hours, so I kept background. Very simple hearing background elements, Onley. When it was essential to the story, however, Children love details. I remember when I was a child and getting lost in a page where they were loss of details, lots of things going on. It all adds to the universe you're creating on to your character's life. Now I will sketch out the backgrounds for Billy Goat. I am leaving some frames empty as the backgrounds in the previous frames will repeat in those ones. Don't worry about making it to elaborate. A simple design can be very effective, too. Once I finished painting, I'm ask out the parts outside of the frames. So go ahead and create some backgrounds for your story, whether simple or detailed. And I'll see you on the next video 7. Finalizing: and now I will finalize the whole thing. You can use any cheat you want at this point. If you can't copy, paste your character with changing minimum details, do it as long as it goes with the general style you're going for its OK. I'm also having some shading and highlighting in the background so the characters can't pop out in the frames. I would normally put some foreground elements to add some depth, but considering we make thes short pictures stories in a short frame of time, I will skip. It is you can see I'm using every trick in the book and cheating a great deal, anything to save your time. Okay, now, at this point, I have to draw from scratch as I want different poses in these last two frames, I gave him some sad, droopy ears to, because this is the point where he gives up, and here he's a confident, happy goat. I'll do some final touches to bring more movement to the Franks on. Here we go way. Have a picture story 8. Final Thoughts: So join me creating a short picture story on share within the project. If you like my class, please like it and share it on. It will leave a comment if you can. Because I love seeing all the people I look forward to seeing all their projects. Thank you very much. For which, in my class