We had our group debrief this morning after written feedback and submitting final colours for our third literature brief with Happy Yak/The Quarto Group (see my previous literature brief work with Nosy Crow and Bloomsbury) this time focussing on creating work for a picture book manuscript.
Literature brief's with Pathways Into Children's Publishing are culminations of the sessions and workshops we do weekly and are set for mentees by publishers to explore what it would be like to work with them on a live project as a commissioned illustrator.
After such an incredible experience working with the team at Nosy Crow and Bloomsbury, I was really looking forward to working with Happy Yak next!
We had our initial briefing over Zoom with Melana Stojic, Creative Director and Carly Madden, Commissioning Editor who gave us a brief overview of the publishing house and the various imprints that have a home at Quarto Kids and a really detailed, clear brief on our next literature brief project - Authenticity: Emotion and Humour.
We were then sent the manuscript of and unpublished story called 'What's the Password' written by Laura Baker and four spread templates with text to work with.
The brief was to illustrate four specific spreads, paying close attention to character consistency, creating artwork showing strong emotion and humour.
I started by sketching out some very rough scribbles and ideas, then went on to creating some rough illustrations for the spreads, ready for our first round of submissions.
FIRST ROUGHS
After submission, we had a feedback session via Zoom. I had really positive, encouraging feedback and I moved on to editing the roughs and developing the spreads.
EDITED ROUGHS
Following the updates to the rough spreads I moved on to developing a colour palette, we had one more submission and feedback on our colours before creating the finished artwork for the final submission.
FINAL COLOURS
I really enjoyed working on this brief, it was so much fun. I love interpreting a text and adding in little details that I imagine kids and grown up kids would pick and point out.
Looking forward to literature brief 4!