Accelerated design sprint
This week myself and of my supervisors other students got together to have a workshop based on a design sprint. As this was only over a couple of hours it was a very truncated version of a design sprint but it was helpful in making us think outside the box in terms of our projects. For myself it helped me consider some ideas I had not previously. one of these was a fun idea with AR that I’d like to experiement with in the future. I don’t know if I’d have time to incorporate it into final major project but I’d like to explore it.
Plot ideas
There are several directions I can go with my picture book In terms of plot. I’ve come up with three main ones. These are:
the birthmark is directly related to the plot
the birthmark is just incidental and has no bearing on the plot (normalization by just being treated as though it’s no big deal)
and the birthmark is fantastical and magical
The first one is what all of the books I’ve managed to surveyed did, I did not find any that do the second (though you can find this done with characters of colour and different abilities). The last one lends itself to doing something fun and creative with the subject that could make the child feel magical and special and let them have some ideas for imaginative play with their birthmarks. I believe there are some books about disability that do this with wheelchairs, I should try to find them.
Concept Sketches
I spent some time this week experimenting with some concept sketches and rendering styles to see what might be feasible in the time frame I have to work with. The first illustration is an I did several weeks ago that is similar to my usual style which is more in-depth and time-consuming.
This next one is designed to let me keep the bold colours but try something new and hopefully allow me to still get work done more quickly. I quite like this one as it looks very picture-booky and it's a style I haven't explored very much.
This next one is a looser style that should be able to be finished more quickly than the previous versions. This is pretty important as I don't want to run out of time when making my book.
The final is a really hard and fast style that whilst I like it I hope won't be my final style.
My Questionnaire is Good to Go!
My supervisor has approved my questionnaire so I'll be sending that out next week!