Experimental Techniques for Picturebooks

Experimental Techniques for Picturebooks

“Now that we reached the end of the course, and before saying goodbye, I’d like to go through all the steps we followed. Take your time and remember that this is a journey, not a destination. The best way to enjoy it is by making it yours: explore, change it, invert the steps or repeat. Above all, have fun because that will be visible in your illustrations. With these tools, you can develop a visual narrative that is inventive, witty, and authorial. Share your process on the forum, give and receive feedback from your peer community, and I’ll see you there! After this journey, I hope you feel even more enthusiasm towards the format of the picture book, its possibilities as a visual storytelling medium, and as an expression of your own artistic identity. Now I’m going, to sum up, everything we talked about during this course so you can make your book project. I started by introducing myself, how I came up to be an illustrator, and who were the artists that most inspired my career choices and my work. Then I introduced the medium: what is a picture book, what are the particular characteristics of the format and how can we make the most of them. We then dig deeper into three of its mechanisms: colour theory with the seven colour contrasts, composition, and text-image relationship. After that, I showed how to work with two different techniques. Both are experimental techniques with mixed-media, adaptable to your own taste and way of drawing. You can keep exploring them in various manners. And also, a technique to create a narrative that is surprising and unpredictable. With this tool, you can create an array of different stories, with the same structure but distinct premises. Take a day-to-day event and change its speed, its duration, remove or add a foreign element to it. With our story lined-up, we started sketching a sequence of spreads for a wordless picture book. We did the full storyboard, developed our visual vocabulary and drew a final illustration, exploring with the oil-based crayons technique. Then we did some post-production work and made a dummy version of our book. Finally, we talked about the picture book industry and market, how to choose to whom you want to pitch your project, and ways of doing it.

Don’t forget to have fun, to play with the crayons and the story elements. More important than anything is to exercise our ability to think with a pencil. That will give you strength and flexibility for any other creative work. Upload your project on the forum, I’ll be checking it from time to time to give feedback, as much as I can, but you can definitely advise your course mates. That will mimic better than anything the environment of a classroom. I’m looking forward to seeing your work and truly hope you had a good time experimenting with me. Bye! ”

Partial transcription of the video

“Final Project We have reached the end of the course. I hope you learned all the steps in order to make your own wordless picture book and apply new techniques to your illustrations. If you follow the lessons, you will see how easy it is to create your own visual narratives. Be original and creative when uploading your final project. I want to see all the steps of your book process. Start by developing your narrative structure drawing a small sequence of images. I want to see how you sketch the storyboard and solve the problems you may find. I have created my own vocabulary and grammar for a...”

This transcript is automatically generated, so it may contain mistakes.

Course summary for: Experimental Techniques for Picturebooks

• Level: Beginner
• 100% positive reviews (232)
• 3566 students
• 4 units
• 21 lessons (3h 53m)
• 11 downloads

• Category

  Illustration

• Areas

  Children's Illustration, Drawing, Editorial Design, Narrative, Picturebook, Storyboard, Traditional illustration