Lockdown Diaries

Weeks 9 to 12

A book/comic about my experience of lockdown. Can't say it's going to be an interesting read but I suppose that's the whole point of the illustrations. Yeah anyway. So my idea is to base my lockdown diaries on the things I've surrounded myself with to help me get through a little easier. I'm pretty sure I want it all to be double page spreads to sort of give the reader the same feeling of being surrounded by it. I'm writing this at the point where I've only finished the first spread and in a way I just figured out what I wanted it to be while I was doing it and I really like the result so ill probably just keep on with that process. 

Research and Inspiration 

I really looked to Olivier Kugler, at the suggestion of Dwayne, and I'm so glad he did suggest him to me because before I had seen his work I was struggling to figure out how to make my ideas look right and Kugler just absolutely nails the kind of thing I was wanting to do in terms of layout and composition. 

As usual I also looked to Instagram to get more general inspiration:

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The First Spread + Figuring Things Out 

So obviously thumbnails come first and I have a tendency to do a few thumbnails and think I've hit gold instantly and just run off with that idea but this time I pushed myself to do more even after I was happy with them and I'm glad I did because *obviously* I came up with something even better. 

Next was the actually quite small amount of physical drawing I did as I knew I wanted to scan it in and colour it digitally in photoshop, so below is how it looked once I scanned my line drawing in. 

Once I got it into photoshop I changed all the lines to a dark brown colour as I knew it'd look much better with the colour palette I was going to use which actually - I think is very exciting. I used the Adobe Capture app a couple of times for this and I cant recommend it enough. To get my colour palette I put in a picture of Momo that also had pink in it because I knew I wanted some pink and I let the app pick out the palette for me. I did have to adjust the colours slightly and as you can see I used a blue that's not in there and nor is the line colour but it gave me a really good area of colour to stick to and I really loved using it. 

This is where it really started to come together, I added in textures in some areas of the drawing and I LOVE how it looks. I didn't add them to everything because it would've ended up looking messy and I tried a lot out before this is what I was happy with but for anyone interested ill tell you were each texture came from;
The wood texture on the climbing frame was a rough hard wood floor image that had a lot of deep and dark cracks in the wood and it ended up looking really great, I think its one of the more subtle textures in the image but it looked so wrong if I hid that layer so clearly its important. 
The coconut is -amazingly- coconut but I think the image description actually said it was a coconut husk coaster. Not that it matters at all but it looks great compared to other coconut textures I tried.
The sleeve is just a heavy knit texture that I scaled down quite a lot, I really love how this one looks, its very cute to me.
And finally the texture of the bedding, I tried SO MANY textures for this, I used several shredded paper textures and some actual hamster bedding textures but nothing was looking right to me until on a limb I decided to try this dense pile carpet and I think it looks really great, I'm so happy with it and I think it pulls the picture together so well:)

The last thing to add was the text and this is another place I used the Adobe Capture app. I initially wanted to use my own handwriting but I couldn't keep it looking consistent enough for some reason, maybe I'm slowly forgetting how to write but I'm not going to worry about that now, instead what I did was use the font feature on the app that allows you to scan in a font and it gives you loads of suggestions for the actual font or others like it and I was curious to see if it works on handwriting and it does! So I scanned my handwriting and it gave me this font among many others that looks like a much cleaner version of my own handwriting. 

And here it is, the finished spread for my little guy, Momo. 

Below is just how it looks as its two separate pages.

Other Thumbnails

Before the Colour!

I thought it would be interesting to show off the pages before they went into photoshop, I just think they look kinda cool.

Final Book Pages

The process shown above is the same thing I did for the other spreads. I kept the colours consistent throughout the pages but not too much in order to keep the theme but not have it feel monotonous.