This project was about creating a children’s book illustrating a song. We could choose any song, as long as we illustrated it in a way that emulates a book a child would read.

When I began thinking of what I could do, I was immediately drawn to the works of Dr. Seuss. I loved reading his books as a kid, and I wanted to try and use his style for my book. At first I wanted to do a song that had no place being in a kids book. I thought about doing Slipknot, or maybe System of a Down. But pretty early on I settled on Africa, by Toto. It is just such an upbeat song that almost everybody knows, and it has just enough of a meme-y quality to make it a little funny.

I started out with rough sketches, where I split my sketch book page in 2 and sketched each spread on one page. After that, I cut paper down to the 8x10 size that our pages would be, because that helps me focus on the finished product. Once I was done sketching my pages, I went over them in pen to get nice black lines, which helped the next step. After this, I scanned my pages into the computer and opened them up in Photoshop. Once in Photoshop, I color selected the white areas and made them completely white. Then I color selected the black areas and made them completely black. After erasing the black lines that I did not want, I opened these pictures in Illustrator. Once in Illustrator, I vectorized them using image trace, then live painted them. After this I just filled in the spaces with color. After this it was as simple as putting the pages into Blurb’s template and sending it off to get printed.

The main thing I learned from this project was how all three of the main Adobe Creative Suite programs we have used so far work together. I used Photoshop to alter the photos after they were scanned in, I used Illustrator to convert those photos to vector images and add color, and I used InDesign to place these images together in one document. Each program has a specific job, and this project helped me to figure out what those jobs were.