My First Story for FarFaria

FarFaria is a recently launched storybook app for the iPad.  In early January I was contacted by one of their Art Directors who had seen my online portfolio on the SCBWI site.  To make a long story short, after a nice phone call from their CEO, I was hired to do illustrations for one of their projects. I began work on the story at the end of January and finished it about 5 weeks later.  The app was launched on February 14th and my first story, "The Magic Fish," was published last week.

After they sent me the manuscript, I was asked to do a series of thumbnail storyboard sketches plus a color sketch of the main characters.  Once these were approved, I proceeded with the final art.  For the final art, FarFaria provided me with a template and detailed instructions on how the art needed to be set-up for their app's layout.

Here is one of the thumbnail sketches and then a cleaned up version that I prepared for the final art.

Here is the sketch that I submitted to show the characters and my color scheme.  The first draft of the manuscript that I received had the fish changing color as the story progressed.  After some revisions, it was decided to have the fish remain the same color throughout. 

Below is the final version of the art that is shown in the sketches at the top.  I created the final art using Corel Painter 11. This scene takes place after the fisherman has returned for the second time to ask the Magic Fish for a favor for his greedy wife. Each time he returns to the fish, the sea and the winds have gotten rougher.

The top image shows the illustration with the template turned on.  The shaded area around the edges is a padding area which is like the 'bleed' area for a printed page.  the white space in the lower half of the image is where the text will be dropped in.  The main part of the image needed to be visible in the upper half of the image above the white area and not be hidden by any of the shaded areas.  The bottom image shows the illustration with the template layers turned off.

Barbara Cooney in Black and White

In a career that spanned six decades, artist Barbara Cooney (1917-2000) illustrated over one hundred children's books. She twice received the Caldecott award for best picture book, in 1957 for "Chanticleer and the Fox," and in 1979 for "Ox-Cart Man," by Donald Hall.  I first became aware of her books while I was working in a bookstore in Washington state. I think the first one that I read was "Miss Rumphius," her 1982 American Book Award winning story of a woman who sets out to make the world a more beautiful place by planting lupines everywhere. Cooney considered this book to be a part of what she called her trilogy, which also contained "Island Boy" (1988) and "Hattie and the Wild Waves" (1990).  In the book "Children's Books and Their Creators," edited by Anita Silvey,  Cooney is quoted as saying that the books in this trilogy "come as close to any autobiography as I will ever get."

Miss Rumphius and her later books were created in color using acrylic paint and Prismacolor pencils, but some of her earlier works were done in black and white.  On a recent trip to our public library's children's classics section, I discovered one of her earlier books, a 1949 compilation of stories and poems compiled by the Child Association of America, called "Read Me Another Story." This book is filled with charming scratchboard illustrations that give us a glimpse into Cooney's style from the first decade of her illustration career.

Here is how Cooney described the beginnings of her career: "In the beginning I worked in black and white, that being the most economical for the publisher. I yearned for color. 'But,' said my editor, 'you have no color sense.' Still yearning for color, I accepted the discouraging pronouncement. Eventually a little color was allowed - sometimes two colors, sometimes three. But each color had to be painted on a separate sheet of paper. These were called 'overlays.' One art director hoped to convince me that working with these separations was 'the purest form of illustration.' But I found it tedious."

Looking at these beautiful black and white illustrations from "Read Me Another Story," I don't think that the addition of color would add anything to their charm.