Kids book development

Before I could start thinking about the illustrations for the book I had to decide what story I will be using. After looking at some old copyright free short stories and not finding any suitable I decided to come up with my own to use. It needed to be interesting and age appropriate (4-7yrs) and have it set somewhere with lots of colour and pattern. This led me to plan out 'Lost at the Circus' about a young girl losing her pet dog in a circus. Now that I have storyboarded each of my double page spreads I will now choose which I want to work on for the competition.

 

Rough storyboard design

 

Plagiarism/Copyright Issues

We had another discussion forum, this time on the issues of plagiarism and copyright in the industry. It started off with the famous Picasso quote:

"Good artists copy, great artists steal."

 

It sounds like Picasso was happy with the idea of people taking the work or the ideas of others into their own work but this view isn't supported by many. We were asked what the difference is between taking someone's work as your own (plagiarism) and using others work to inspire your own practise. We were shown a number of examples where the idea of plagiarism maybe wasn't so clear and asked us all what we thought of this sometimes confusing and difficult issue. It was suggested that all our work is inspired by something and by someone's work. How far could the plagiarism problem be taken if nothing is completely original/organic these days? If every work can be connected to other work what is considered copyright infringement?

 

As artists we draw inspiration for our work from things we see around us. This would make it hard to know where to draw the line in plagiarism cases.

Book Binding

We all got the chance to learn book binding and after a couple of hours and lots of help I managed to make this little book. It's definitely not perfect but I enjoyed doing it and learnt a new skill (sort of!).

Competitions

For the next 5 weeks I will be responding to one of three live industry set competition briefs. I decided to try out the Macmillan Children's book competition as I feel that my work style could turn out looking good in a children's book and the brief itself sounded challenging but interesting. The brief included a number of requirements which my kids book would need to have. I need to complete 4 double page spreads or 3 double page spreads and the front cover. The story can be my own or an existing one which is out of copyright.

http://www.panmacmillan.com/macmillanprize