Down the Yellow Brick Road
In this project I aim to make an 72 page illustrated short story, I intend to print this out and bind it manually when it’s finished and maybe do some posters as well. The story will be a dark retelling of the popular book and film, The Wizard of OZ; my version will be more based on the film version of the story, which has many subtle differences, mainly the fact that it is shorter and that the silver slippers are changed to ruby slippers. My book will be aimed at 14-19 year olds, and will be roughly 9000 words long; I intend to get this finished by May.
I was inspired to make an illustrated book because since the age of 7 I’ve loved both writing and illustration and I wanted to do something that incorporated them both.
My inspirations for the content came from my love of Alice in Wonderland, I found a game series, American Mcgee’s Alice and it’s sequel Alice Madness Returns. These games are dark twisted versions of Alice in wonderland and they were my main inspiration in making my dark retelling of the Wizard of Oz. I was also inspired by dolls, and how innocent yet creepy they looked; I really wanted to incorporate this into my art for the illustrations.
I intend to write the story in Microsoft Word in college and Open Office at home, as I don’t have the money to buy Word at home. As for the illustrations I intend them to monochromatic it and I intend to draw these digitally as I am more comfortable working on a tablet then on pencil and paper. I’m going to use a program called Paint Tool Sai, a simple program that allows you to blend colours and fully rotate the canvas; I’ll be using this program because I’m used to it, and because photoshop is too slow. I hope to print out each page (text and picture) on A4 cream paper via Photoshop. Then I can sow down the middle of a group of four pages for binding and the book will be A5. I hope to bind the hardback cover in either fake leather or fabric.
My timeplan is very loose as my work relies quite a lot on my temperament, for example if I have an art block I won’t be able to draw for up to three days.
By the 13th of April I intend to have the final draft of the story.
From then I will work solidly on my Illustration until June the first.
Then I will focus on printing and binding, if further research shows more time will be needed I'll start work on binding earlier.
If I have time, I’d like to do some chapter art or some coloured art to print as a poster. I’ll only do this if I have free time though.
To record evidence I intend to make a weekly journal in a separate blog to my main FPM blog. In each entry I will write what I have achieved that week, if I am happy or not with what I have produced and any advice/critiques I have received by peers, teachers, or friends/family. I will also record the results of any Beta testing I do.
