Book Illustration Guide

Meghan McCarthy guide to book illustration
This guide to book illustration contains some really good tips and an overall method of practice that will help me develop books in a more structured way. Meghan McCarthy suggests that a good idea to begin with is to go to the library and look at illustrated books to see what stands out and appeals to you. What do you like and what don't you like. Its just as important to understand what puts you off a book so you can understand how to avoid making the same mistakes yourself. The guide talks about page layouts, careful researching and roughing that I have read into before but one thing that I think really stood out to me as something I should pay more attention to is the pacing of the books I make. The text in the book maintains the rhythm of the story and could make or break the success of the narrative. She uses 'Where the Wild Things Are' as an example of well executed pacing in a childrens book. pacing is difficult to pin down to a set of rules, its suggested that you should not have a large amount of text on one page then little to non on the next unless there is a good reason. Because of this I think that regular and careful reflection is needed to judge the pacing on the book throughout the design process. Does the book seem to jump from one thing to another, do the transitions between pages seem abrupt, does the text become monotonous. All thing to consider.

Some thing that is talked about every time I talk to children's book illustrators is their hatred of the gutter in the middle of a double page spread. It is important to avoid this with and detail in your composition, in this article it is also suggested to make sure text is placed at least and inch away from is. The curve of the page when reading a book can alter the shape of parts of the illustrations and have a negative effect on the overall illustration. It is best to keep the area clear of any details of importance. For my polar bear book I am going to trial using only on side of each double page spread for the illustrations with possibly one or two exceptions throughout the book to create varied compositions but for the most part keep text and image separate.

the article mentions the most common book size of 8 x 11". I am going to make a dummy of my book at this scale to see how my work functions at that scale.