WEEK ELEVEN - A

Today we were introduced to our final assignment. We have two options to choose from: a development of mythical characters or a short story. I was leaning toward the characters at first but after reading through the short story assignment some more I started to formulate some ideas. 

Short Story

I began my brainstorming and research. I know I want to write my own story and I want it to be more of a children's book. Professor Mata gave an example of No, David by David Shannon which I actually loved to read as a kid. I wanted to find more style and storyline examples, however, I couldn't find the full copies of the books without buying them. I had the idea then to look at Youtube and see if I could find some read-along videos of people reading the full books to kids. I found these two channels below. 

I clicked through some of their videos and Googled some books I remember reading as a kid to collect some more ideas. Here are some of the books that have a style or a storyline that I'm leaning towards. 

I want to focus on textures and the characters. Besides Creepy Pair Of Underwear, the backgrounds are more of a secondary element compared to the characters which is a similar style I want to use (I added Creepy Pair Of Underwear because of its use of the green color as the only color besides greys). I'm Not Just A Scribble is one of the more unique stylistic approaches I found with its mix of analog drawings, photographs, and digital additions. 

I continued to think of a storyline. I tried to find inspiration as I went but I wanted to also reflect on my childhood and what I enjoyed. I thought about maybe using finger paint in a similar way as I'm Not Just A Scribble, a story with animals and numbers, and then I thought about goodnight books. 

I remember my mom used to sing me the chorus (I'm not sure if she knew all of the words) of Goodnight Sweetheart Goodnight by The Spaniels. So my idea was then to do a goodnight book of a little girl (maybe an animal) trying to fall asleep but she kept finding an excuse (such as I need a glass of water, or there are monsters under the bed, etc) and her mom would keep saying, goodnight sweetheart. I thought it was a pretty sound idea but then I got a little worried if the goodnight sweetheart would come off too similarly as the annoyed goodnight already. 

I continued thinking and then I remembered that when I couldn't fall asleep my mom would sit by my side and give me things to dream about until I fell asleep. Sometimes they were more practical like hot air balloons or kittens, but other times they were more silly like cotton candy clouds and bubble gum rivers. Merging my two ideas together I am going to make a goodnight book filled with ideas of dreams to dream.