Paginations + A Plan

Last week I took a blog detour and made a long post about my postcard making process. Today I want to get back to my development of The Reluctant Sparrow.

Over the past two weeks I have been meeting with Hannah Smotritch every monday afternoon to talk about The Reluctant Sparrow. She has been immensely helpful with figuring out how to move my book along from idea and concept into a more complete and finished iteration.

The first week we met I showed her the synopsis, my idea sketches, and the narrative writing. I also showed her a partial pagination I had made up of some illustrational ideas.

She immediately helped me by doing written spreads of the whole book. I had done this partially before but I had never really committed to them fully.

The blue inked spreads are the ones Hannah did based on her understanding of the plot. I went back and drew out my spreads as they existed then. There was a bit of a difference between the two. Something that Hannah pointed out was that I hadn't addressed what the climax was and ultimately why Mac decides to leave. She had assumed that it was because he realized that his love of home was in some part attributed to his friends, and ultimately his desire to go south is because he realizes that he misses them. 

I started re evaluating my plot arch. Why did he eventually decide to go? Perhaps it was because he missed his friends after all. So I wrote out a slightly different plot direction, one that focused more on Mac's relationship with his friends. I also wrote out under each spread, ideas for the illustrations and what I wanted to convey through them. 

After creating half-size paginations with the illustration sketches, I met with Hannah again. Once more we talked about the structure of the story, and looked at the illustrations as devices for the plot development. So I spiffed them up for the critique for Tuesday, made sure they were all nice and neat, and that the plot didn't have any blatant holes or problems. 

I got a pretty mediocre response in the critique. People were nice about it, and I was given a few ideas for some different places to do research for my illustrations, such as the natural history museum and the children's book collection at the University. I too was a little disinterested with my story; somewhere along the line I had dropped the subtle beauty it had and picked up a bunch of cliche. 

After the crit Camilla shared with me her thoughts about my story, voicing similar concerns I had, and encouraging me to go back and rework my story how I wanted it to develop. 

So I did. Below are the new spreads put up on my studio wall. 

Instead of focusing on the friends, I returned to focusing on Mac's reluctance. He stays because he isn't ready to go, because he loves his home and wants to spend more time there. He leaves because he does miss his friends, but also because he found that his home changed, and that he changed inside. He starts to wonder what migrating is like and starts to yearn for the south and the unknown, he isn't forced to go because of his loneliness. 

Yesterday I met with Camilla again and with both old and new storyboards in hand, created a final storyboard of the plot. I'm so happy with where I've ended up in the story. It feels like a coming home to the place my story grew from. 

I'm glad I met with Hannah because she helped me get into a good work flow and progress from where I was, and perhaps too she helped me realize the story I wanted to tell by showing me one I didn't. 

"The Fearsome Fellows" 

"Staying"

Detail from "A Snail Hunt"

"Untitled"

My goal for next week is to make sure I have all my research done. I want to visit the U's museum of natural history and see what I can find about the Seaside Sparrow. I also want to check out the special collection of illustrated children's books here and study how the masters do it. This coming week will be a prepping week so that when my March break comes the week after, I'll have all the tools and direction I need to jump into a wild frenzy of illustration.