A Book in Progress
Papa what's you Job in the making
Hello and good evening on this fine Sunday.
Today I will be talking about my most recent book project “Papa What’s Your Job?”This project is nearest and dearest to my heart out of all the books I’ve made this far. The entire project was a huge learning experience and I’ve learned so much about my process, successes and weaknesses which I will now try to summarise for you.
I started off the Project thinking I wanted to do something about collections and focus on how objects can be a great way of creating a character. I remember how beautifully Marijpol did this in her graphic novel Hort. She crafts the rooms of her main characters with care and so much detail it is astounding.
I knew I had to implement these collections into a story, so I came up with the concept of a girl not knowing what her dad does for work so she would be walking around the house looking at his trinkets imagining the things he could be doing while building the character of the absent dad character. While Sketching Dana and Rob (the characters) together I realised that the bond of a father and a daughter interested me much more and the collections could be less of a focus and more of a world-building technique on top of that it would be weird that the girl is left home alone so this story emerged.
Drawing up a book
Exploring by drawing is something that was said over and over again during lectures and I tried to take it by heart as much as possible. While I know that I’m too much of a thinker and a quite slow drawer, I pushed myself.
I started this whole book with a colour palette and slowly branching out to other colours throughout the process. Knowing these colours worked together helped me explore different mediums. I discovered Pan-pastels which allowed many ways of play by overlaying other mediums or layering them on top of each other.
Many hours, pages and drawings later I fleshed out the characters Dana and Robert and their personalities. I drew from life, movies and imagination on this. Usually, I’m a bit lost when it comes to drawing from imagination but starting from photos or life and then developing it in my head makes this process a lot easier.
When writing/ Illustrating a book to pitch it to a publisher it is common to only have a few final pages that are finished and the rest of the book are black and white sketches. This way you don’t have to finish an entire book because a publisher will want to make changes either way. But they can see the vision in the final illustrations.
Doing Finals (the hard part)
Committing to a final style is the hardest part for me. I can never tell if it’s “good enough” to be a final piece. I’m still not sold on the ones I’ve done but This is probably because I’ve looked at it for too long and need a break. I struggle with a big expensive piece of paper and decided to do these finals in my sketchbook this time. I composed them digitally and I’m quite happy with the look and feel of it.
In between drawing and finishing, I visited the Bologna children’s book fair. Sketchbook in hand and ready to take advantage of having so many creative, talented and nice friends to show them my book project and get feedback on which directions I could go. This really motivated me. Get people to look at your projects! and hype you up!
Whats next for the Project?
I will for sure bring Dana and Rob to Bologna with me to find a Publisher. For that to happen I will make changes since some of the spreads aren’t fully fleshed out yet and need some refining. I do think the pace and story progress work well and a publisher is most likely going to change some pages anyway. I will have to rework the characters because I’m not very consistent in the age and proportion of Dana.
Either way, I’m already beyond excited for Bologna next year and all the projects I will see there that don’t even exist yet! But I’m most excited about seeing all my friends from my course and from the Boloklub succeed in 2025!
You should totally check out all of these lovely talented people ^
Thank you for taking your time and read through this newsletter! If you liked it you’re welcome to share it and help me reach more people! forever grateful, giving you kisses,
x Leya
I was so excited to see you posted another newsletter! Keep up the amazing work!