These are some of the small book dummies I made to send to my dearest editor at Chronicle Books, Ariel Richardson and to the books' s art director, the wonderful designer Amelia Mack. We were trying to figure out if the layouts would work out fine for the reader to interact.
In this first dummy, I was testing the option of asking the reader to TURN the book to the left so I could "fill" the whole page with water. In the story, Bunny jumps from the boat to go snorkeling underwater. We ended up deciding that it might be confusing for the reader and decided instead to move the horizon line to the top of the page.
So in this second dummy, I tested the way it would look if I moved the water line to the top of the page. This is the option we went for at the end.
This scene didn't end up being part of the book. Bunny would tap on the clouds to make rain, son the page would fill up with water.
FORMAS is an eighty-page silent book and a good example on how to tell a story only with pictures. At the beginning of the story we might thing it is the woman's journey, but the surprise comes when we realize that the main character of the story is something different. Being a journey and story told only with pictures, I had to create a map of the place for the sake of clarity and causality.
This is a detail of the map showing the first pages of the book. The girl descending the stairs on the left will walk from left to right, meet some people on the street walking in both directions and then she will meet the person who is carrying a shape that fits exactly with hers. The thing is, the story will not be that predictable, and that becomes one of the themes of the book. You can see in the book that the P.O.V. on these pages keeps the same distance for all the scenes and "the camera" moves for left to right in order to follow the girl.
In these first pages, I keep the horizontal line for the ground on the same level so it's easy for the reader to understand the actor's (the girl) movement on the stage.
When the fish falls into the water, the "camera" zooms out so I can show the boat. Later it's going to zoom in again in order to show what will happen on board.
Here's an interview where I talk about about the book at the Guadalajara Book fair in Mexico.
When I was asked to illustrate the first book of the Cat series by wonderful author Deborah Underwood, I knew from the manuscript that the story was strongly supported on characterization. I did hundreds of sketches and explored many different options for the way Cat would look like. This is a sample of one of the sketches that I brought to the meeting at the Penguin offices in New York City.
And this is the way Cat ended up looking like.
These are some studies for Cat's facial expressions.
I just got a new Wacom tablet with more than one thousand pressure levels. It's still far from what you get with a pencil, but much more than what you get with a mouse. Anyway, I like all three.
