Springs-Senior Thesis

Now that our book is in the final stages, Ellie and I have been working on getting judges, working on the paper, and the final presentation. There's not much to say about today, as I spent the whole period outlining the paper. I want to discuss our development process, the challenges we faced when coming up with ideas and illustrating, and the message/impact we want our book to have on the kids reading it. These are also the ideas I hope to hit in the presentation.

Today, Ellie and I mostly spent the period collaborating on assembling the book. It's actually a pretty tedious process of matching the words to the images and putting everything together. I've tried my best to leave spaces for text, but it takes a while to determine the best format. The text needs to be readable while still fitting with the book's aesthetic. Mostly, it's just down to the little details that make the book perfect.

Back from Spring Break! I was able to get a lot of illustration work done, including character design and background work. I spent the period editing my drawings in photoshop and working on color palettes. I think I might do the coloring in photoshop, so I also researched brushes and tools that I can download to assist me. Ellie and I were researching judges as well. Claire Eckardt's dad used to work in publishing, so we might ask him. He knows about book marketing and design. I'm also thinking about using my art teacher, who I think judged a thesis last year, too.

Today, I continued work on illustrating. I was able to sketch out some basic characters and backgrounds. We decided that the main character of our story is a tough third grader named Madlyn Melara. She lives in Wisconsin and stands up to the bullies who make fun of her at school. I have to make her cute but also not pink and frilly, which is kind of a difficult task. I spent the period experimenting with clothing and facial designs.

Today, Ellie and I worked together on structuring the book. We've decided on the length (20 pages), so now we need to figure out how to break up the story and the text. We were experimenting with different placeholder texts to figure out how many words we want per page. Putting together the book is definitely going to be the most challenging part. As of right now, I'm hoping to use either Photoshop or Illustrator to do it.

No thesis work today- we just worked on AP registration and scheduling!