The Monster In The Dark

Since my Electronic Illustration class, I've had the idea of monsters/creatures rattling in my brain, so I was really excited to put it to paper in my Children's Book Illustration class! For this assignment, we were to write a story/ adapt an already written one (or even a song!), then illustrate a 32 page/12 spread long book throughout the entire quarter. I had a few ideas other than something with monsters, but I really wanted to pursue a simple idea of a boy discovering a creature underneath his bed & overcoming his fear of the dark.

children's book monster creature boy book

After getting my idea down & thumbnailing the entire book, I set out to sketch out the scenes with ink & colored markers. I knew that my book was not going to have environments, considering that there was not much movement going on to begin with, so I simply focused on the characters & what they would look like in a plain environment.

I created a few action poses for the main characters: the little boy - who I named Richie - & the creature he finds under his bed.

Despite using these markers, I wanted to experiment in a paper cut technique. This process was going to be really long & tedious, so I needed to make sure that all of my characters were either blown up & cleaned up or redrawn so that the lines would be clear to distinguish when I transferred the image to colored paper.

After cutting out my figures, I put them against paper & sticky tack to get a small shadow from the scanner's light. This was really helpful for the yarn bits that I have scattered across the book!

Then finally, I was ready to arrange my figures in Photoshop!

The following spreads are only the ones I was able to complete, so there are a few pages in between that are missing.

I unfortunately couldn't complete the book like I had hoped, but I did meet the requirements! However, here are a few pages I got to work on but never got a chance to finish. I'm hoping to make this into a summer project that I can send to print when I get a chance to focus all of my attention to it!