First Ever Dummy Book.

[erinrew]

I have completed my first ever dummy book for a manuscript I wrote and already I want to revise my illustrations... I am planning on redrawing the imaginary scenes to make them more dynamic, but appreciate any feedback before I dive into things. Thank you!

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-P6SfgBbZySuBvh63lOPAnb6xjmtW2do/view?usp=sharing

[Kevin Longueil]

@erinrew not sure if it is just me but i have tried to open it several times with no success....thought it might be because i was not logged into my google account so i tried that.. no luck ..maybe it is just me though?

[erinrew]

@Kevin-Longueil Hmm... when I click on it it opens. Not sure how to trouble shoot this?

[Kevin Longueil]

@erinrew I just got it open - i logged into google again and it worked

[Kevin Longueil]

@erinrew really nice story! one little typo where the boy carrying the board says "to" instead of "too" - i Love the line "It, like all perfectly normal trees, was a magical tree!" - i am not really qualified to talk about what should be in a dummy but one small thing might be to not use the airbrush tool ... Will, Jake, and Lee list this as something to avoid if you can. Maybe something with texture or more watercolory??

[erinrew]

@Kevin-Longueil Thank you Kevin. Good catch on “to”, darn typos!

Thank you for the tip. I only use the airbrush tool for shadowing in the rough sketches. Once I go back into to do finale artwork the airbrushing will go away.

[Michael Angelo Go]

@erinrew Some feedback I would offer is consistency.

Most of your illustrations are single spreads that define two pages in the book. spread 13 feels out of place because while I understand you want to show the progression of a scene, but perhaps you could make that page more seamless.

This is a suggestion you could or not take into consideration, but could you perhaps experiment with distance and perspective? I like spread 6 because we're really up close to the children which breaks the sort of repetition of just having a scene of the kids by the tree but is still consistent because it's a single spread defining two pages.

Spreads 9 and 10 feel boring because it's the same scene, except the child in the wheelchair moved in the other spread. The left side feels like a waste of white space because there's not much there, especially in the other spread where he has moved.

Other than that I think this dummy book is really fine, but I would really like to see you revise these and maybe color them in so I can see how you utilize color.

[erinrew]

@Michael-Angelo-Go Thank you Michael for your feedback and I agree with everything you said. You’ve given me some great direction going forward. Back to the drawing board.

[mellanrumsformer]

@erinrew Thanks for sharing! I think it looks promising. Maybe you can have more contrast between when the tree transforms to other things and becomes magical. Like it can become really tall or maybe the whole tree is out and flying, stuff like that. Think it would give a more magical feel. I would also recommend trying to break up the perspective or composition a bit more but I guess that goes with your doing them more dynamic phase