Grief

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Jess Claxton

When it came to drawing my story I found it particularly difficult to draw certain parts, for example the forest, so I thought it might be simpler if it focused more on the rabbits feelings rather than trying to explain his feelings through him getting lost in the woods during a storm. I wanted the story to be fairly straightforward so that young children could easily understand what was happening.

I wanted to find out more about how people feel after the death of a loved one so I researched into this and came across the 5 stages of grief. These are:

1) Denial and isolation

2) Anger

3) Bargaining

4) Depression

5) Acceptance

I thought that it might be interesting represent these stages in the book as it would help children learn that it is okay is feel any of these ways after someones death. Therefore I will incorporate these five stages into my story, ending on the acceptance, giving the story a happy ending.

Ideas

Posted on April 17, 2016 by Jess Claxton

Although I had moved on from the original story idea that I had, I still wanted to keep it on the topic of death. I got some inspiration from this illustration from Duncan Beedie, which I posted in this post.

I thought that it might be interesting to use animals rather than human characters, it would also be easier for me to illustrate. I came up with a simple story line that focused on two rabbits, one of them dies and it sees the other one becoming lost in the woods during a storm, which links back to my original idea. The story would resolve with the rabbit finding his way out of the woods where it is sunny again and full of colour.

I wanted the characters to look cute so the children liked them but I wasn’t sure at all how to draw them. I googled illustrated rabbits and found various images but many of them were incredibly detailed and far more complicated than I would ever be able to draw. I then found this website. I liked the simplistic way that the rabbits were drawn and wanted to see if I could use a similar style in my illustrations, although I would like to draw the rabbits so that they are recognizable as individual characters, so there must be something different about each rabbit.

I drew out (half) a storyboard to plan out the illustrations that I wanted for my book.

From here I could then start drawing the real illustrations that I would use for my book.

Initial Story Ideas

Posted on April 14, 2016 by Jess Claxton

Firstly I tried to come up with a story for my book and then develop the illustrations from there. I found it quite difficult to come up with an actual story. I had parts of a storyline that I wanted to incorporate but did not know how to put this into a full plot. Initially, I wanted to write a story around inequality but eventually decided against this and focused on the topic of death and grief.

My first idea was to focus on a young girl with her parents. One of the girls parents would pass away and she would be followed around by a dark storm cloud, indicating her sadness. However, as the story progresses the cloud starts to disappear and it eventually passes, showing her becoming happy again.

These were my original notes for writing my story:

Beginning

Happy family – shows them doing things together

Middle

Her dad dies. She is shown doing all the activities she’d do with her dad but she is followed around by a rain cloud

End

The rain cloud starts to disappear and everything becomes brighter and colourful again.

This is the main character that I had drawn.

I found it quite difficult to draw people and ended up moving on from this idea, although I am not entirely sure why as I quite like it.