Process Paper:
The
Crafting of Loon Lake
While creating my children's
story book, Loon Lake, I had
to make decisions regarding the story, language, and presentation to
ground the final product in a specific niche. I chose to target my
book towards children who are just starting to read for themselves,
so I made numerous decisions in the name of easy reading and physical
familiarity in the hands of a child aged 4-6. I related my book to
the course by giving it an overtly environmentalist theme.
The first decision I made was
the medium and shape of the book. These decisions were made balancing
my own personal convenience and the functionality of the final
product. I chose to make my book on sketch paper because I already
had a sketch pad that I rarely use as my usual artistic medium is
paint on fabric. The feeling of holding the sketch paper is
reminiscent of construction paper, but finer and smoother, giving the
child holding it a sense of both familiarity and novel grandeur. I
chose to fold the papers in half and bind them with staples in the
middle because it reminded me of the writing journals I was given in
early elementary school, which were made of colored printer paper
folded “hamburger style” and stapled. This fashion of binding
also allowed me to utilize smaller illustrations to good effect.
Once
I knew the shape of my book, I started writing the story. I chose to
relate my book to the course by making it reminiscent to both Dr.
Seuss's The Lorax and
the picture book we talked about in class, The Dandy Who
Sat on the Toilet. I came up
with the story of biodegradable soap causing an environmental problem
because I used to spend all of my summers at a lake in which bathing
is prohibited. Our family still took baths in the lake occasionally
with biodegradable soap, and I distinctly remember my mother
explaining to me why it was only okay to bend the rule on rare
occasions. The central conflict in my story is pollution in a lake,
much like in Dandy,
and it also shares that book's reliance on a cooperative solution to
fix a problem. The child who sorely misses the loons' song and the
child's mother function together in the story much like the Lorax
does in Seuss's book. I chose to make the story more complex by
having the first solution to the environment's sadness go horribly
awry because I wanted to show that humans are fallible, even when
they are trying to act like a Lorax. I also wanted to introduce the
idea that big problems rarely have simple solutions to the child
reading the story.
I chose to make the central
animal characters of the story a family of loons because I grew up
listening to them all summer and have extensive experience drawing
them. I also chose loons because there aren't a lot of other
children's books featuring them, and the word itself is fun to say
for a child. The loons also made it easy to create an ecosystem that
gets believably out of balance without a large number of species
needing to be described. I also liked that the fish that loons eat
are easy to draw, allowing for the production of lare numbers of them
on the page easily.
My loons stand apart as
individualized characters only mildly. I was originally going to give
the names Loona and Hullaballoon to the parents, but I couldn't think
of two more loon pun names to give the chicks. I decided to give the
names to the chicks instead and refer to the parents as Momma and
Papa because I wanted the youngest characters in my children's book
to be the ones with individual identities. In fact, the loon chicks
are the only characters in the whole book with names. The lack of
heavily defined human characters allows the young reader to insert
themselves and their families into the story.
I was very careful with the word
choice in the story. Because I was aiming for something a child would
be able to read with minimal or no help from his or her parents I
chose to use very simple language. This is why I used “special
soap” instead of biodegradable soap and “tiny things living in
the lake” instead of bacteria and other microorganisms. The absence
of these difficult-to-read words also smooths out the story by
getting the point across understandably without having to take a
break to define challenging new words while in the middle of the
challenging task of learning how to read. The most difficult word to
read in the book is probably the name Hullaballoon, but the sound and
shape of the word is sufficiently unique to allow most children to
remember it and feel good about being able to read such a big word so
easily by the end of the book.
There
is a great deal of repetition in my story because I wanted to build
the young reader's confidence as he or she progresses through the
book. The book has a lot of pages, so it looks rather long for a
beginner to read. The frequent repetition of entire phrases allows
the physical appearance of words in those phrases to become familiar
to the child. This makes the child able to read the familiar sections
more quickly and smoothly. This shows even children who may be having
trouble that they are improving, giving them inner encouragement
based on actively building confidence rather than the external
encouragement of their parents. Remembering my experiences practicing
reading in both English and Hebrew, I found the internal
encouragement of quickly conquering familiar words and phrases much
more effective than the encouragement I got from parents and
teachers.
I chose to used typed text for
ease of reading and put small paragraphs on each page to eliminate as
many intimidating factors from the story as possible. Short
paragraphs with narrow margins allow the child to come at the story
in unimposing small chunks. It context with other books on the
child's shelf, the balance between text and illustration in mine
offers a smooth transition between the child's old role of looking at
pictures and his or her new role as the reader of the story. But the
text is not directly embedded in the images so that nothing distracts
the eyes from the words when the child is actively sounding them out.
The small blocks of text also allow for quick progress through the
book. As a young reader, each time you get to turn a page is a
victorious conquest of a measurable section of the book. The more
frequently the child gets that physical manifestation of moving
forward, the more confident the child will feel. And when the child
gets to the end, he or she will get a sense of pride from reading an
entire book by themselves.
I chose to situate the
paragraphs around the same place on every page for the sake of
predictability. Because the first solution to the problem only makes
the problem worse, unlike many other childrens' books, I wanted
something to remain consistent.
I originally wanted to do the
illustrations in paint as I usually do, but I decided to use colored
pencils instead because I didn't want to wait for paint to dry (or
risk gluing the pages together) and my relative inexperience using
colored pencils makes the drawings closer to those in a child's
classroom. Colored pencils are also faster to work with and more
forgiving of mistakes on paper than paint is. In paint, each adult
loon would probably have taken 5-10 minutes, but they only took 1-2
minutes each towards the end of the book with colored pencils. I am
still much better at blending colors and creating dimensionality with
paint than I am with colored pencils, but I like how childlike many
of the illustrations turned out.
I
chose to put some small details into the artwork that might not be
noticed on a first reading so that the book would have more to offer
on subsequent readings. The adult loons, for instance, have
individualized necklace markings. This allows the viewer to choose
which one is Momma and which one is Papa and keep their identities
consistent throughout the book. And then at the end, it allows the
viewer to choose which of the children is which when they grow up.
There is also a tiny person with a sad face holding a bottle of
Special Soap on the page where the lake turns green, and the pupil of
the moon's eye is shaped like a star.
Another thing I chose to do with
the illustrations is isolate the images pertaining to humanity onto
the right hand side of the page and allow the images of nature to
sweep across to the bottom left. I chose to do this for a number of
subtle reasons. The first reason is a complex form of foreshadowing
because the solution to the central conflict in the story is a
restriction on humans. It is also a commentary on that solution
because the images still work effectively in the greater narrative
when limited to the right side of the page, suggesting that we as
people will get along just fine in our lives when we make collective
decisions to restrict ourselves for the good of our environment. The
nature images fill the right side of the page and overflow onto the
left because the world we live in can't be crammed into a box and
isolated from the territory of that which is distinctly human. This
breaking out of imposed confines and invasion of the side of the
pages containing text that only humans can decipher represents the
tendency of the natural world to impact us in unexpected ways when we
try to take control of it. The curve of this encroachment on humanity
is like a flood about to happen.
The
style of the images is meant to bring to mind Dr. Seuss's The
Lorax and The Dandy
Who Sat on the Toilet. The use
of vivid colors and the way that many of the illustrations fill the
page all the way out to the corners is reminiscent of Dr. Seuss's
style. But the shapes and details aren't like anything in Dr. Seuss's
books. The level of detail and realism in the outlines of my
illustrations are closer to the pictures in The Dandy Who
Sat on the Toilet. Neck markings
aside, the only character who is reliably identifiable is the child,
and that is because he is only child mentioned in the story just
like there is only one dandy. The use of visible blending of colors
to create dimensionality rather than Seuss's highly detailed outlines
and the use of perspective in many of the images in Dandy
sets my work apart from both.
When
I finished all of the illustrations for the book, I had 6 extra pages
that were left blank. I had planned to have 2 blank pages just in
case I had done my math wrong and needed more than I expected, but
there were a number of instances in which I decided to combine the
content of two pages into one after I had already numbered and
started illustrating. Most of these combinations were made because
something about the text of one of the combined pages would have been
too difficult to illustrate, but one instance was due to an
accidental combination of the content of two pages of text into a
single picture. When I got to the end, I had to figure out what to do
with all of the extra blank pages after the large “The End.” I
didn't want to do 6 more elaborate drawings because it was around
midnight at that point, but I didn't want to leave the pages blank
either because it would have looked very strange. I also couldn't
remove these pages because it would have damaged the structural
integrity of the book once it was bound while making it very
difficult to bind it in the first place.
I solved this problem by
creating a step by step guide to drawing loons in the style that I
used throughout the book. I chose to utilize the extra space this way
because the sketch paper that the book is made of simply begs to be
drawn on. This also adds to the transitory nature of the book between
the childish passive viewing of the pictures to the active reading of
the text. The child has to finish reading the book to get to the
coloring section and the paper that the child is drawing on is of
much finer quality than the construction paper that is provided to
most children. There is also plenty of space for the child to
practice drawing loons multiple times on each page.
I decided to make the front and
back covers simple and unimposing because I didn't want the rather
thick-seeming book to be intimidating to new readers. The soft curves
and soft colors of the front cover allow the young reader to give it
only a passing glance and move on quickly to the story inside. The
blurb on the back cover promises an interesting tale if the book were
to be picked up in a store promises a fun activity for reaching the
end of the book.
My
children's picture book, Loon Lake
was designed for an audience of early readers. This was done through
decisive techniques applied in the writing and physical appearance of
the book, including word choice, balance of text and illustration,
and the illustrations themselves. The textual and visual content of
the book both relate to topics we talked about in class because they
utilize strategies implemented in Dr. Seuss's The Lorax
as well as The Dandy Who Sat on the Toilet.
I am very pleased with how the final product turned out and
thoroughly enjoyed working on the project.
