High Hopes – Part 2

Cont. from my blog, “High Hopes”….

During my Christmas vacation in 2009, I got serious about writing and illustrating a good story.  I began to collect ideas and add them to my proverbial peg board.  Proverbial?  Imaginary? Whatever…   The neat thing about retaining a list of ideas (even if it’s only in your head) is that they tend to get better with time.  Some ideas need to stay in the cooker for a while.

In February or March, I came up with a scenario that worked for me.  It went like this:  A married couple, both world-famous opera singers, discover that they are expecting a child.  Their dreams for the baby are off the charts.  They imagine their child to be the most amazing singer ever. Finally, their daughter is born and grows up to be a nice little girl.  But, to her parents horror, the child is not only tone-deaf, she has the voice of a foghorn.

What would life be like for that little girl?  How would she deal with that kind of expectation and disappointment?

Obviously, the idea of a neckless giraffe wasn’t far behind.  Soon, I got to know Audrey, her parents, and her friends Nelson (an accident-prone aardvark) and Doodle (an oversized hyrax).

Much like it is when I compose music, writing this book was like having creative constipation (pardon the comparison).  On my family vacation in June, I forced myself to write a couple of pages every day.  In the meantime, I started coming up with character designs for Audrey and her friends.

©Brent Vernon

Once the book was written and the copy finalized, I used my Wacom tablet and Corel Painter to generate really rough sketches like this.

©Brent Vernon

I then opened the sketch in Adobe Illustrator.  Using it as my guide, I created near perfect vector lines for each main character element in the scene.  This is a painstaking process, certainly the most time consuming step…  It probably took me about five hours just to create the Illustrator lines in this scene. Those anchor points nearly killed me!

©Brent Vernon

When the lines were completed, I copied them into an Adobe Photoshop file for coloring and shading.  I think this was my favorite step in the process!

©Brent Vernon

With the main characters colored and shaded, I dumped the file back over into Corel Painter where, using the original sketch, I finished the scenic/background elements.  Then I opened them one last time in Photoshop for final color editing.

©Brent Vernon

Then, with some final color corrections for print, we put it all together!

©Brent Vernon

So this was my first stab at writing and illustrating a book.

I have so much to learn about the process, but – so far – the response to “Neckless” has been enthusiastic.  God willing, Book #2 will be here before you know it!!

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