Bug's Nap — The Illustratoring

I was supposed to write about this last Wednesday, and I didn’t. How’s that for TASK AVOIDANCE?

Overcome by… guilt?… I finally sketched out some pencil ideas for each page, and I can at least talk about the process even if I don’t have a final product.

First of all, after A Bug’s Lunch inspired me to keep going with at least four other books (a fifth popped into my head last night), I created folders for each one and then duplicated the original Affinity file for each one. That way, everything is already consistently set up for each book: fonts, styles, etc.

I changed the dialog on each page, did a light rearranging of Bug and friends, and printed out a draft copy of A Bug’s Nap. From there I simply doodled what I would need on each page.

Here you can see I labeled the page TREE when I set up the document. You can also see that I left Bug’s original path lines from the first book; I’ll reshape those after I get the other drawings done.

Here I’ve changed Bug’s response to Spider, and I’ll probably change it again to obscure Spider’s pronouns. It’s all part of the ABORTIVE ATTEMPT —> GESTALT —> SUCCESSIVE APPROXIMATION cycle.

Of course, lightly penciling in ideas in a draft copy is no better than a shinyperfect, is it? Now comes the hard part, of actually drawing them. Could be worse — could be doing it on vellum paper with india ink. (I’m old. Look it up.) At least in Affinity I can undo/reshape/hide/delete anything I put on “paper.”

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I recently gave a copy of A Bug’s Lunch to a friend, who shared it with her five-year-old grandson. On the last page, he drew Bug on the dotted path through a whole bunch of CANDY! It was awesome, and if I can get permission from the adults in his life I’ll share it with you.