Dancing with Your Ghost
For this project, I decided to choose the song “Dancing with Your Ghost” by the band No Resolve. This is a dark and lonely song that I wanted to convey as a children’s book. The book follows the dark, mysterious tone of the song as it begins with a spread of a man and woman in her dying moments. The story is that the woman is dying for an unknown reason and the man grieves her death. He imagines that he can see her in his misery and dances with her ghostly form. At the end of the book, he joins his beloved in death. While this may seem a bit dark for a child, I thought it would be perfect for some scary storytelling and it is something that the child could read again as an adult. The hidden messages of grief, disbelief and tragic love are themes that are littered throughout this book.
My concept was to pursue a dark and creepy way of storytelling. My main inspiration is the art style of Tim Burton. His style is twisted and strange compared to most children’ art. I thought this type of style would be perfect for the book’s illustrations. At first, I struggled with the color palette and the drawings themselves. The color palette was mostly black and white with a few accent colors. While this was interesting, it was a bit too much for the story and I felt a child would quickly lose interest in the book. I then decided to switch to colors like red, tan and purple for the main character since he is the star of the book. This allowed him to contrast with the dark background and the white and blues tones of the ghost. I also changed my style so that it was more engaging visually.
To begin this project, I knew that I wanted to combine both traditional artwork with digital.
I sketched out rough sketches on sketchbook paper. I then hand drew the final outlines on Arches water paper. Once I felt comfortable with the designs, I inked the drawings traditionally. This was done with black ink and a dip pen. I also used watercolor to create a rough painting of a tree that would be used in the background. After letting the inked drawings dry, I then scanned all the drawings into Adobe Photoshop. For the watercolor tree, I duplicated it multiple times and used watercolor textured brushes over the drawing to create a digital watercolor look. The same coloring process was applied to the inked outlines.
By interacting with Adobe Photoshop’s interface, I became a lot more comfortable with using it as a drawing and editing program. I learned new techniques like how to scan inked outlines into Photoshop and then convert it to crisp lines that could be colored in. Using InDesign taught me how to follow a grid and use it effectively when creating page spreads. I never knew that an InDesign file should be converted to PDF for accurate printing, this was an interesting bit of information that will definitely help me in the future as a designer.
