Assignment 7 - Visual Narratives Week 3

Assignment 7 - Visual narratives (Week 3)

Brief Synopsis:

• Developing Prototype f0r the storybook.

Please refer to my previous post for Assignment 7 for the story development.

We were given the entire week to develop the prototype for the storybook. Hence since yawen have came up with the drawing, the colouring part will be on Liling and me. We tried to explore on the various colouring style, schemes and software. Initially we thought of using Deep paint, a free software downloaded from the net. However the tools are not very easy to manipulate despite the fact that they have loads of nice prefix brushes. Hence we thought of trying out Coral Painter but due to the short time span to equip ourselves with the skill on it we decided to use back Adobe photoshop.

As the sketches are drawn manually so there is a need to do clean up before we proceed with the colouring. After doing the clean up, we started to explore on the techniques for colouring and colour scheme. After some discussion, both of us agreed upon the colouring scheme n style. From there we divided the pictures and worked on it. In this way, it will be more efficient due to the limited time span we had.


Here are some of the pictures I coloured:

After we have finished colouring, both liling and me need to complie the pictures that we had coloured together. We used freehand to arrange the layout for the pictures and text accordingly. After which, we proceed to the binding shop for printing and staple binding. However at the printing shops we were told that printing has to be in the multiples of four. Thus we need to make some arrangement of the page layout and insertion of some blank pages in order to make it to multiples of four. Before we proceed to do the full printing and binding did some trial printing to ensure that there is not much lost of picture colour quality as compared to the screen. We also did some test print on different GSM and finished paper in order to obtain the optimal result. After some discussion, we decided to settle down with Glossy finished paper as it enhances the picture with more 3D effect(giving it the texture and shades) we had in mind while doing the colouring.

We opt for soft cover and staple binding instead of hard cover and stich binding due to the following reasons:

• Target audiences are children aged 6 to 9 yrs old. It will be much easier for them to hold the book which is light and more flexible
• Our book is rather think so it will be awkward to have thick cover for it
• On top of that, due to the quality of the paper we used for printing, it will not be suitable to pair it with hard cover binding.