For my group’s final project, we decided to do a children’s storybook. Our storybook is titled What’s Happening to Wallace?
Before coming up with the idea, my team brainstormed for several other ideas for the content of the book. We wanted to create a self-help book, yet stay on track and fit the theme of culture. Some of our ideas include a book that serves to inform children about divorce, and hence help children whose parents are divorced deal with their situations. Another idea we had was on the theme bullying and how children should stand up against bullying. The idea that we finally decided upon was about puberty. Since the children’s storybook is targeted at children aged 7-9 years old, our book serves to inform them about some of the bodily changes they are going to encounter in a few years’ time.
A Little About this Book
The story tells of a typical day in Wallace bear’s life. He wakes up, brushes his teeth, changes his clothes, ate his breakfast and went to school. What’s different is that he find lots of physical changes in his body. These are actually signals of him growing up (the bodily changes one undergoes during the puberty stage). Oblivious to this, Wallace feels out of place, isolated and helpless because he thinks he’s a monster when he’s shunned by his friends in school. Upon careful explanation by his parents, Wallace comes to understand that this process is natural and there’s nothing to be afraid or ashamed about.
Developing the sketches
These were the very first sketches we came up with for the general outline of the story, the placing of the characters and text. Later on in the developmental process, we took one of the scenes, the bathroom scene as we feel that the story doesn’t flow as smoothly as there has to be a transition from home to school and school to home again.
Developing the final prototype
In illustrating our final prototype, we faced difficulty in coming up with the main character Wallace as we wanted the character to look like a monster, yet remain cute. We drew inspirations from various children’s storybooks on how Wallace should look like. Our greatest inspiration was from the famous children’s storybook, The Gruffalo. The following are just some of the numerous attempts we had in drawing monster Wallace.
Eventually we decided on using a bear because a bear can be both a man-eating monster or a cute cuddly companion. We wanted to bring across the point that being a monster is all but an exaggerated form of imagination on the children’s part. Being overly self-conscious will result in these inferior complexes.
Finally, evolution of Wallace!
We also explored various colour schemes for Wallace before finally deciding on one.
While drawing the illustrations, we also incorporated some of the design principles we learned in class. The following are two examples, one being the 3X3 grid and the other the Fibonacci Spiral.
The Final Prototype
(Click to enlarge)
Here are thumbnails of the final storybook! I love this book so much because my group and I really put so much effort into it! We each got a book for ourselves and I can’t stop flipping through the book. :)
Reflection
Time was really a huge factor in the creation of this storybook. Despite devoting at least 15 hours a week (per person!) to this project, we barely made it in time to send the book for printing. We must be one of the most overzealous groups!
This project really took up the bulk of my time these past weeks but I’ll say it’s definitely worth it! It gave me tremendous practice on Adobe Photoshop and also hand-drawn illustrations. I never thought I could draw well enough to illustrate a book but because I drew the final Wallace, the same person has to draw most of the illustrations to maintain consistency.
Of course, the final project is not all just the storybook. There’s also the 20-page (horror!) design document and the presentation to prepare for. I think our design document is really well done! For our presentation, we incorporated a mini-skit as we felt that 7 minutes is just not enough to convey all our thoughts and developmental processes so we cut it to a skit that summarises the main points.
Lastly, if my project group mates are reading this, thank you guys so much for working so hard the past few weeks! :)
