Little Paper Planes: Creating a Gothic Children’s Book for my Senior Capstone Project
Research: how do I make a gothic children’s book?
I spent all summer thinking about what I wanted to produce for my senior capstone project. Throughout my time at Juniata College, I focused on creating videos for myself, on-campus clients, and community partners — yet, I had always wanted to write a book (and amidst COVID-19 and social distancing, it seemed the perfect time to do so).
I spent most of the fall semester reading children’s books and planning and writing my own book. My research consisted of reading Coraline by Neil Gaiman, A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness, Doll Bones by Holly Black, and Thornhill by Pam Smy.
I had no idea how to even start, but both of my advisors, Hannah Bellwoar and Ryan Gibboney helped keep me on track every week. I met with Hannah every Thursday to talk about the next book and scholarly paper I read, and she helped me outline my book, chapter by chapter.
Defining the Scope:
I was inspired by my love for children’s literature and illustration. I reflected on the books I enjoyed reading most as a kid: stories with ghosts, monsters, and the children who were brave enough to defeat them.
My plan was to devote the first semester to research, reading books and scholarly work, and writing the first draft. The spring would be devoted to illustrating, editing my book, producing a book trailer, and putting the whole book together into a physical format.
Inspiration:
With any illustration project, I also made time to seek out illustrators that I enjoy in order to keep me inspired. Illustrators such as Rebecca Green, Felicia Sala, and Victoria Semykina. These artists inspired me to leave the ipad behind and to experiment with mixed-media; charcoal, gauche, watercolor, colored pencils, oil pastel, chalk pastel, and paper cut-out art.
I also took inspiraton from all of the books I read, specifically A Monster Calls and Coraline. As I read, I kept an eye out for common themes or characteristics of both gothic fiction and children’s books.
Gothic Characteristics:
- Atmosphere of “menace and terror”
- Ghost, monsters, dolls, death or dying
- Superstitions, the supernatural
- Castles and graveyards
- The uncanny: “when at night the well-known furniture of the kid’s bedroom is suddenly transformed into a predatory monster”/”Emotional ambiguity”: a perceived flaw resulting from confusing feelings of foreignness and familiarity”
Themes:
- Loneliness and abandonment
- Bullying
- Accepting reality
- “New world” isn’t what it seems: child’s journey from light into dark.
- Greif
But I didn’t just look at the themes and characteristics of the books I read, but I also studied the illustrations. Another reason for choosing these novels in particular was because of the illustrations inside. The illustrations in these books added to the gothic theme:
- Grey scale/monochromatic
- Texture/line work
- Lighting and shadow/passage of time
Something else I noticed and wanted to note when looking at these illustrations was the perspective and angles. As a filmmaker, I was reminded of how important different perspectives are. Like the shots or camera angles in a film: a low angle shot, as if we are the character looking up at this monster, or a point-of-view shot or bird’s eye view shot of the character’s feet.
Writing:
Near the end of fall semester I started writing. It was a challenge to sit down and write everyday, but after my advisor helped me outline each chapter, I then had a roadmap that kept me on track. By the end of the semester I had a rough draft completed.
Little Paper Planes has gone through a couple edits this semester already, and I’ve received helpful notes from friends.
During the process, I also made another outline in order to layout my book and how to make it better.
Having someone else read my manuscript helped me understand what might not be working for the audience and what I needed to add to make the story clearer. I turned to scratch paper in order to form new ideas and to think through the plot holes and the character motivations.
Figuring out Style: rough sketches, pastels, and paper cut-out art
It had been a long time since I’d done an illustration or completed a painting, so it was daunting to start sketching again. I had no idea where to start and I didn’t have very many supplies. After peeking in all of the art classrooms, I had a handful of different supplies to borrow.
I started by having fun, playing around with different mediums. I didn’t have any watercolor paper, but I had Bristol board, so I played with gouache (not great with Bristol board) and colored pencils on top for detail.
I messed up on the first illustration many times, which led me to try paper cut-out art to try to strategically hide my mistakes. It turned out that I loved the process of cutting out paper with scissors or an X-acto knife and grabbing glue sticks.
It felt like I was going back to the basics — being a kid and playing around with art and glue and coloring outside the lines. I also realized I was focusing too much on making these illustrations for
other people; trying to make them these amazing, perfect pieces. And that’s not what I wanted my book to look like, nor what I wanted in my art process. I like being messy and scribbling and not caring too much about having a pristine art piece.
When doing my research, many of the illustrations were in grey-scale. They have these beautiful, creepy black, grey, and dark illustrations. So I began there. I found every shade of black, every grey paint and every white colored pencil and pastel.
Yet, I didn’t have many art supplies and that was limiting my ability to be successful in the ways that I wanted. I didn’t have many grey colored pencils, nor could I find any in the art classrooms, and it’s hard to work with one grey paint, three black colored pencils, and one white oil pastel.
So I turned to a different monochromatic choice: blue.
I suddenly had a plethora of choices; ultramarine, violet blue, true blue, ice blue, light blue.
But it still wasn’t working for me.
The blues might fit the theme of grief and sadness, but it wasn’t quite working in terms of the spooky and gothic nature of my book.
So, I went online and purchased a few extra supplies. I knew I wanted to work with colored pencil, gouache, and paper-cut out art, but I also wanted to experiment with oil pastel and wax crayons. I think it gives a lot of texture, vibrancy, and life to a piece.
And the blue fits a much different mood and tone, and wasn’t quite what I was looking for, but I am glad I tried it anyway. It gave me a deeper understanding of what I wanted my book to look like, and it made me more passionate when thinking about the dark, scary illustrations that I was looking for.
The Art Process
I started on the cover art first, which features a trail of paper planes moving through the page and then the title on the left. I knew what it was going to look like since I had done several thumbnail sketches. First, I used a blue Prismacolor Col-erase pencil to sketch out my design lightly on cold-pressed watercolor paper. With this, the idea is that after I’ve used colored pencils, gouache, and wax pastels.
Next, I used gouache — more opaque than watercolors — to do an underpainting: I loved how it looked, almost like spilled coffee. The gouache I had purchased was a warmer grey and I liked how grimy it made the world of my piece. After the underpainting, I went in with white and dark grey gouache to add some detail and to make the paper planes stand out.
After using gouache, I went in with colored pencils; grey, deep grey, black, and white to darken the background and to make the planes even more visible.
I also used grey wax pastels to add texture and movement to the piece.
With other pieces, like when drawing the new sister, I used the wax pastels to create the lined texture of her hair and oil pastel to create the thick texture of her face. I also used paper to create the tears.
I enjoyed how messy and frantic my illustrations became.
I then had a system: I would use watercolor paint, then colored pencil, then smooth it out with white pastel, then I’d add texture back into the piece by using wax pastel. I also enjoyed the value shifts in my pieces and how much contrast there was.
It was beginning to look like the book I’d imagined it being.
Indesign: learning to get my book print ready
After I finished writing my second (and probably finally draft, save for some minor tweaks here and there), I began focusing on putting the book together in Indesign.
I knew I wanted to print hardcover books, so I wanted to learn how to make a dusk jacket for the book, and I wanted the dust jacket to look as professional as possible. In indesign, to create this layout wasn’t too difficult to do. I made the dust jacket so that it could fit a 6x9 book, which is how big my book is going to be.
This was my first and second design for the dust jacket, and while I loved it so far, I wanted to try to have an illustration fit the entire layout, front and back:
Since I wouldn’t be able to afford too many hard cover books anyway, I wanted to create a cover for the paperback book.
I decided to use more paper cut-out art to do the title and to do my name. After I cut out the letters, I would glue the letters accordingly onto a piece of watercolor paper. Then I’d scan it in, put it into Adobe Illustrator and made the text a vector so that I could scale it up or down without losing quality, and I could then put that text on any background I wanted (Like the cover art above) or I could just simply throw it onto a white background (like below).
Standing Stone Coffee Company: Student Exhibition
I was asked to place two of my pieces at the Standing Stone Coffee Company exhibition, which aims to showcase student work.
Promoting my work: Instagram and Facebook
The first way I promoted my work was by using Instagram Stories. I usually create designs and layout in Indesign, but since I was going to be using Indesign a lot for actually laying out my book, I wanted something quick and easy, so I used Canva to create these.
It was fun to see the responses from my peers and to give a sneak peak before the Liberal Arts Symposium.
Hard Copies: Publishing on Amazon
My plan had always been to self-publish my book — there were times during the process, however, when I didn’t think it would actually happen. This semester felt vastly different with the pandemic, and there were times that I wanted to give up altogether.
But once I completed the illustrations, layout, and final edits of my book, I knew I wanted to try to get these books printed.
I researched different book publishing companies like Blurb, Lulu, and finally Amazon. I realized that Lulu and Blurb were way too expensive for me to order books, so I opted for Amazon. The only issue with Amazon publishing is they only have a paperback option, and I knew I really wanted a few hardcover copies of my book. So I used Lulu to print the hardcover copies with dust jacket (my dream was to have a book with a dust jacket).
Storyboarding: crafting a children’s book trailer
Since I am a video creative who also loves creative fiction writing and illustration, I wanted to challenge myself to produce a book trailer for my capstone project. As a filmmaker, a book trailer is not something I’ve created before, so I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to learn something new. Currently, I am going through another round of edits on my manuscript, Little Paper Planes, while also thinking about how I might create this book trailer.
Below is my process of planning and storyboarding the book trailer:
My first step was to quickly do some thumbnail sketches. I wrote down my ideas on little sticky notes, along with sketches to later look back on.
