Bilingual Children's Book - Felicity
Bilingual Children's Book - Felicity
My Propel semester was spent creating my original children’s book If There Was No Night in both English and Filipino. Please see below to download my book, and to hear more about how this piece came to be.
Making When There Was No Night was, without a doubt, a great ordeal. Aside from time being a scarce and precious commodity for this project, there was also the fact that I was very new to the drawing application that I was using at the time. Thankfully, I decided to take Mary Poppins' words to heart when she cleverly advised that "a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." Thus, I found a plethora of ways to make my low-budget school project look more professional than my actual skill level. By doing these five things, I was able to metaphorically take sugar with my medicine, which made my semester at Propel so much more enjoyable.
1. Using a thicker brush for the lineart
When I started out with the illustrations for the book, I used this brush with the thickness settings on low.
The reason for this is because that particular brush looked very similar to the one I was used to back when I was using another drawing application. Like I said, I was very new to the drawing app that I used for this project, so I wanted to ease myself into it with the help of familiarity.
However, problems arose the longer I used the brush. One of these was that drawing the final layer of lineart was extremely stressful. Because the brush I was using was thin, mistakes were more evident. I had to be extremely careful. There is nothing wrong with being meticulous, but I was pressed on time.
This resulted in me avoiding the arduous nature of it all by not cleaning up the lines as much as I would have wanted to. I wanted to switch so badly to another brush that I'd found, but I feared that the art style would shift drastically.
Eight pieces later, though, I finally caved in and started drawing with a thicker brush. I pointed the change out to Mr. Hansen during a one-on-one conference, and he said that the change wasn't noticeable at all. You can imagine the relief this brought me and the time I saved with the rest of the pieces.
2. The symmetry tool
This was another time-saver.
Procreate had a tool that allowed me to make symmetrical patterns on the page with ease.
This was handy for making borders on pages, as well as the pages with card motifs.
3. A consistent colour palette
These were my first three illustrations.
It’s pretty evident that the page compositions were pretty diverse, so at the time I felt that it wouldn't look very cohesive when I compiled into a book.
Fortunately, I came up with a solution; I would simply make a palette that I would strictly adhere to and use for all of the pages.
4. Kawit Free font
Font-hunting was something that I was admittedly not looking forward to. I had a couple of font resources at my arsenal, but I was a little intimidated to browse through them. And then one day, as if the graphic design gods had sensed my plight, I stumbled upon this free Filipino-inspired font by Aaron Amar on gumroad.com. It ended up being the font that I used for all of the pages in my project. I was
really happy with the way it looked, because it seemed to really fit in with the aesthetics of the story. Thank you, Aaron Amar!
5. Reiteration
When I was thinking about making the cover page, Mr. Hansen mentioned something really important to me. He said that a previous Propeller had done some research on children's books, and apparently children like seeing themes and drawings reiterated. This led to the decision that I would take an illustration from inside the book and use it for the cover as well. This saved me a great deal of time and effort.
I think that it also helped relay a lot of the messages in the book more efficiently as well. For example, the first page narrates how Bathala was in charge of the Earth. Later on, when the main characters Mayari and Apolaki were discussing who would inherit the Earth, the same format is used.