Week 17+18: Off to Print!

The past few weeks have been devoted entirely to getting the Thumbelina book ready for printing. At this point all of the design work was finished so it was a matter of writing the narrative of the book, filling in any image gaps, and producing illustrations for key points in the story. I'd been writing sections of the book throughout the project so that was finished up at the beginning of the week. I sent off the book for proofreading/feedback, and with a few tweaks got the go ahead for printing!

Designing the covers for this book was a challenge. I had a "back up" with the plate scene illustration I already painted, just in case I completed blanked out with ideas.  But my goal was to have completely new images for the front and back covers of the book.

Rough back up cover

I choose to illustrate this moment from the book for the cover:
"The little fishes, who swam about in the water beneath, had seen the toad, and heard what she said, so they lifted their heads above the water to look at the little maiden. As soon as they caught sight of her, they saw she was very pretty, and it made them very sorry to think that she must go and live with the ugly toads. "No, it must never be!" So they assembled together in the water, round the green stalk which held the leaf on which the little maiden stood, and gnawed it away at the root with their teeth. Then the leaf floated down the stream, carrying Tiny far away out of reach of land."

I ended up with the idea below but I couldn't figure out how to make this work, I was also completely stuck when  it came to colour for this image, so I went back to thumbnailing the front.

Went back to scribbling down ideas for the front cover, looking at them now I should make these clearer since a stranger can't really understand what’s going on in the scenes.

I settled on the idea of Thumbelina sitting on a lilly pad like the previous attempt but I went for a composition with a little less going on. After figuring out the colours everything went smoother with painting.

front cover

I painted the front cover on an off  during the  two weeks and during breaks from that I painted the back. This was thankfully fairly straight forward as opposed to the front cover which was killing me. 

Back cover

Besides that it was just filling the gaps in my book with images.

image on the introduction page of the book

How Thumbelina's mother changes throughout the story

Sketches of Thumbelina interacting with the toads

Wedding dance: This is on the final page of the book

The introduction of the Butterfly character, this is the moment before she takes Thumbelina's sash

Page Layout

I went back to this image and refined it for the inside of the book, late in the week

 On Sunday I submitted the book to Blurb for printing and it should arrive in a week or two!