"Catch Of The Night" in Book Form

This is a short video I took on my phone to show you the style of the book I made for, Catch of The Night. In case your new around here, this started as a story for my Children's Literature class from last year. I am in the process of turning this into an animation and consider this a draft. 

One of my goals for this has always been having the design start as an inverted line and transform to the opposite, just as the night turns to day within the story. Click here for past posts for this project from design to completion!

Also if your interested in book arts this is called an accordion style binding. The story is set on the roof of a tall house with a man fishing in the sky, therefor height was a big theme for him. This book style allowed me to work with that. For my animation I would like to channel this idea further maybe with a constant scroll movement, I'm not sure yet. 

 

Catch of the Night Process Work

Here is some of the process work I did to get to the final illustrations for "Catch of the Night."

These are some images I collected for ideas of Frank. For Frank I was thinking of him being a mixture of an old fisherman and Mr. sandman.

These are some of the images I collected for Franks House. I wanted his house to be impossible tall since his profession was fishing in the sky. I also wanted it to feel tall and isolated like a lighthouse. 

For the stars I wanted them like everything else to feel somewhat aquatic. So I looked at a lot of fish. Then I landed on betta fish because there fins felt almost flame like. They are stars after all. 

Before I got started doing any of this I wanted to search around for pieces of artwork for any ideas I hadn't already thought of. These are some pictures I collected. Starry night was always in mind. 

Author and Illustrator David Small once said that the best picture books are the ones that tell the story through images and the words aren't necessary. I dont know if I have completely accomplished that goal but its my first draft. I started planning the illustrations by stanza and I wrote down what moments I thought were crucial. I wrote, wrote and re wrote. I wont bore you with every little note but heres a few. 

So here is a jumble of design tests I made. Sometimes you just need to see something to know its not going to work. Often it spurs better ideas. 

From the beginning I had this idea of inverting my line but in the amount of time I had I couldn't figure out how I wanted to do it. One of my main changes I think I will make to my story this summer is incorporating that. For now I tried to accomplish that idea with keeping a simple color palette with two contrasting colors, blue and yellow representing night and day. 

Lastly this is the font I was basing my writing on. 

Catch of the Night ©

During this semester I have been incredibly inspired by my Children's Literature class. In that class our final was to make a children's book. My story is called "Catch of the Night" and it was inspired by a story my mom told me when I asked her where babies come from. She told me there was a man on the roof who fished for stars in the night sky, that we all begin as baby stars and he delivered us to our parents, like the stork. This is the extended version. I am considering this to be a first draft. I plan to take a course on publishing children's books this summer and my goal is to get my story published and for it to be read to all the babies!!! I will post some photos of the construction of the book soon. As always feedback is welcome, everything can be enhanced for the better.