Making the Board Book - Images.

Developing board book images.

I wanted my images to be recognisably set in Outer Space, not too crowded, and colourful.  Making the sequenced dummy books was the most useful thing I could have done towards developing the final images, because I could see the errors at this stage.

Dummy book page with colours not reading as different enough from each other

I needed punchier colours that stood out from each other.  I decided early on that each Alien has a Spaceship and a number the same colour as itself.  This gives younger children stronger visual clues to help read the sequence.  I actually went out and bought a brighter green paint and Rose madder, so that the colours would look as bright as possible.

I tend to paint my images too close to the edge of the page, so I tried to keep the images slightly smaller in relation to the size of the page.  This was also to give me more room for the text as well.   As the background was going to be very dark at the edges, I decided to paint the image, and then scan a drawing on top, as it gives a very dark line that stands out against the blue.  I painted around the images in tones of blue that were lighter than the background, the lightest around the figure itself.   I used large brushes for this to give a looser background compared to the more tightly painted figures and spaceships.