idea for final

My idea for this project remains the same as it was for the other poem I was going to use.  I still want to do a children's book.  I want to illustrate the pictures in Illustrator and color them.  I want the whole design of the book to be simple and fun for a child.

The poem I chose to use for the book project was “Daddy’s Making Dinner” by Jeff Mondak.  In this book I wanted to emphasize childhood.  I visualized this poem being displayed in a childlike way to appeal to kids and make them want to read.  For this reason, I chose to make a bigger book that was not a regular rectangle.  I chose this book structure because I felt it was more playful for a child.  This relates to my interpretation of the poem because I wanted to emphasize childhood and fun from the beginning.  

The process I went through to make this book started in Adobe Illustrator.  Since I had worked with Adobe Photoshop before and had used it for my last project, I wanted to try something new and decided to use Illustrator.  I had started with the cover.  I wanted to make a big oval shape and decided to use a plate as my idea and repeat the shape through the whole book.  I did the entire cover first to get a feel for what I wanted and then moved on.  As I started the book I did the text pages first.  I split the poem up into what I thought would work best for the book.  I added text in the middle of the plate and squished the words together so that it was not too crowded in the center.  I did this for all the text pages and kept the same text throughout.  After I did the text pages, I drew each picture page out in illustrator.  I wanted to keep the illustrations simple and fun.  When needed, I got an image from google, brought it into Photoshop, made it and outline, and saved it as a png to be brought into Illustrator.  I did this for all the picture pages as well.  Originally, I was going to color the pictures and then scan everything back into the computer and print it out, but then decided to keep it after I colored it.  I wanted to color the book myself because I felt it would add a fun childlike quality to the book and be more relatable to a child when they read it.  After I was finished, I printed the pages and cut each one out.  

To construct the book, I glued the pages to posterboard since I wanted there to be text on the back of the picture pages.  After I cut each page out and mounted it on the posterboard, I colored the pages.  After my first attempt at coloring I was not happy with the result.  So I reprinted and re-colored.  I did not like the second result and again reprinted and re-colored the pages.  After the third time I was happy with the way the pages came out.  I wanted to use softer colors since children normally read books before bed, but add in some bright colors where I thought appropriate.  I then colored the inside of the plate where the text was different colors for a fun effect.  After, I was not too happy about the cover, so I decided to make a flap.  I cut a slit in the page, glued two pieces of paper together, and made the flap for the cover of the book.  On the flap it says, “Lift flap and draw a yucky food!”  I thought this was a good idea because it would allow the child to interact with the book and get them excited about reading it.

After all the pages were done, I hole punched each page in two spots and binded the book together with rings.  I did this because I wanted to continue to keep the book simple, and because the rings matched the overall structural shape of the book.