Final Book Blog

A Character Sketch of the Book:

The Circles of Round is a children's storybook written by Signe Sturup and illustrated by Winnie Ma. The story is written in rhyming couplets, and revolves around circles in a town being lured by a Triangle who attempts to sell them corners.

This playful story is told through photographing coloured construction paper pieces to represent the characters, actions, landscape and dialogue. There are approximately thirty picture dominant spreads interspersed with text that unravel the conflict, resolution, and moral of the story.


The Evolution of the Project:

This book project has taken many twists and turns (as evident from my first post in this blog). I began with an idea to do many loose sketches of characters and compiling it into a novel. So I drew, drew, and drew some more. The story slowly evolved into drawing objects and documenting them fictitiously.

Then over the course of the strike, I began writing a story about each of the objects and how a little girl interacted with them when she was young. After writing my story, I began drawing and my loose sketches became more and more constrained, to a point where I practiced drawing the same object multiple times until it became perfect. I was in good shape; I had completed illustrating the girl, her objects, and surroundings in early December.

The next step was difficult, a combination of factors led to abandoning my Object story. (Perhaps it was the lack of momentum, or I was never fully immersed in my project since the beginning, and maybe I just wrote and illustrated the story during the strike just to occupy my idle hands and brain and to relieve the guilt that I had become a gluttonous sloth.)

Nevertheless, when school commenced in February, I didn't know what my next steps were. This led to a sudden epiphany to hand draw all the text in the story, to accompany my illustrations. I had a good feeling of completing the spreads in this manner. I hand wrote pages of text, but I still wasn't sure "what type" or "what style" of writing I should use. Then the self doubt over the spreads rolled over into doubting whether I should finish project in the first place.

The Circles of Round was a story sitting on my desktop for some time now (that I had promised to illustrate for my friend, and was eventually going to). With Reg's encouragement, I jumped into an entirely new book, and new concept. I was going to illustrate them in a very sparse, and minimal way, using solid colours, shapes and lines. Then something dawned on me, to use paper strips. I did some initial text runs, and I abhorred it. I thought it looked awful.

I'm convinced it was "book monster from before the strike" that made me dislike anything I produced. Again, Reg instilled confidence that it was the right direction, and it brings me to this point, where I am going to finish illustrating The Circles of Round.


Making Choices:

Maybe it was because of my numerous false starts to my book, the type, format, layout and images of The Circles of Round came together quickly, and naturally. The images are photographs and cover the entire spread. (I may change it up a bit once I develop the rest of my spreads)

The Victorian type I chose was initially for my Object book, but it worked even better for this book; the terminals on the type are nice and round, and look like circles.


Compromises:

Since The Circles of Round isn't completed yet, I don't think I would have done anything differently. After all, I've done ENOUGH books differently, up until I stumbled upon my current book. I guess I have to be thankful for the extended time from the strike that I had the opportunity to hit enough road blocks with my previous investigations.

I'm fervently working on my current book to have printed and bound for gradshow.


Pleasures and Frustrations:

Book is a lot of work.
It can be a lot of fun work.
But be prepared: the process of developing your ideas, implementing them, and placing them on spreads is a long journey. Especially if you have/had no idea what kind of book you want to make.

Also, in terms of designing: there are so many little things you have to be mindful of such as pacing, colour choices, overall look that you have to constantly think of your book in a macro and micro level. You're constantly changing up your spreads in order to fix the consistency and give it an element of surprise when needed.

wretched cold

Bedridden for most of this week... I didn't get to accomplish half the things I wanted to. But I do think I have one spread down. It's moving along, I know what I need to get done, and again, I will most likely need retake photographs as I make my spreads.