Introduction to the project
This final project is going to be a children's book and a collaboration between me and my grandmother, she does the writing and I do the illustrations. The purpose is to either produce a fully formed book or a concept to a children's books to be fully produced later.
The story is from her childhood, she became inspired to write this story when she got a book for my little sister about a cow that evaded the slaughter house by swimming across a fjord and ends up getting bought by a lovely couple that lived in the fjord and took care of her for the rest of her life.
The story my grandmother wants to tell is of a baby lamb and her adoptive mother cow and it's a true story that happened on the farm she grew up on in the 1960's Iceland.
My grandmother, Guðrún Arndís Jónsdóttir, grew up on a farm in south-east Iceland called Nýpugarðar. Her parents were Jón Arason and Sigríður Vilhjálmsdóttir and her siblings are Elfa Signý Jónsdóttir and Sigurður Gunnar Jónsson. The story involves my grandmother and her little sister, their father, a gentle mother cow and a little baby lamb.
My grandmother approached me in creating the illustrations for the book and she would write it, telling a wholesome story about interspecies adoption, found family and strong bonds between a parent and child.
The house that my grandmother grew up in, it remains mostly unchanged.
A buttercup flower
Page one: First week, Getting started
I had been in contact with my gran about the making of this project and started by gathering as much information about the location and layout of the farm. She sent me a sketched up map of where all the houses are located that were there at the time and what their functions were. Some of the houses have been bulldozed or changed since she was little, especially the old turf huts.
I wanted to compare it with a satellite image of the farm now a days just out of interest.
The map gran sent me
Satellite image
Panoramas taken from google earth of the area (not by me)
Panoramas taken by me in a nearby area ( family members included)
The landscape is full of grass, wild flowers, rocks with moss growths and bushy vegetation. They are full of all kinds of textures to play with and different shades yellow, red and mostly green and dark brown, almost black mountains. Just a small part of the biggest glacier in Iceland can be seen pouring between the mountains, it's clearly visible from the farm.
I brought my watercolours to try them out and see if thats what I want and to to that I wanted to see if I could create some interesting textures.
A quick introductrion to the people from that time and place
The people of the story are real or have real life counterparts but we haven't decided if we want to have their real names in the story or not.
My grandmother
My aunt
The sisters in the story are like I mentioned before, my grandmother and her sister, both born in the mid 50's. The story takes place when they were kids, my gran doesn't remember exactly what year, but around the mid 60's.
My great granddad, Jón Arason, was born to farmers and was one for the most of his life. Later in life he moved to the nearby town with great grandma and worked for the town.
He was an accordionist and played in farm ball venues along with his brothers and also taught his children some music.
I didn't know him much personally but he was the main inspiration for to get into playing the accordion.
My great grandmother, Sigríður Vilhjálmsdóttir, also grew up on a farm and became a teacher for some time and also did some factory work.
She did a lot of handwork like sewing and knitting, making clothes for her and her family and kept up with the fashion by reading sewing magazines.
I didn't get to know them much but when family members talk about them both are remembered fondly by their children, grandchildren and family.
A chain of Violets
Looking into the past
Children books then vs now
The era this story takes place has a very different style to it and fashion, but the story is meant for modern children. The art directed toward children was a bit different than today.
The children books in Iceland back then, some are still being published today so the kids are still familiar with them.
These book series have been in printing since 1951 and are still being sold everywhere and read in kindergartens... well the un-problematic ones that is. All of them are just short stories about either moral lessons, adventures or education.
These two school books my aunt and grandma said they remember reading.
The art children books in that display either very bright, full images or made with risoprint with limited colour palette. Both had either slightly more detailed humans or much more cartoony ones, I would choose to go with a slightly more cartoony route.
The colours are very saturated and usually don't go crazy with the shading, either using cross-hatching, other colour or no shading
They often create texture to make an illusion of for example the grass in "Gagn og Gaman" second book, no super details, just brush strokes, and patterns on clothings are very common.
These are much newer books, the one with the dog "Lubbi Finnur Málbein" was very popular with the kindergarteners I used to work with. A lot of younger kids books today often go for soft watercolour feeling, still very vibrant like the older ones, and generally opting for a cartoony style.
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Home made fashion
A lot of the clothes for children in the country side was made at home and mothers would get the patterns from sewing and knitting magazines. Lucky me I got my hands on photographs of family from the past in that era and of other children from a book called "Börn í Reykjavík".
 Children in Reykjavík playing on a sea-saw |  My grandmother and aunt, one wearing a dress and one wearing a jacket and either leggings or a skirt. |
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 Gran and aunt in knitted sweaters. |  Another one of my gran. Knitted sweaters were everywhere. |
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 My gran from my dads side and her twin brother. They lived in another part of the country from my other gran. |  Patterned shirts and polyester jackets were common. |
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 A line-up of children in front of a "Braggi" (an army shelter), left over from WWII and were turned into houses for the poor. |
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Clothes were full of patterns and colour, no t-shirts with pictures or glitter, maybe sequences for flashier clothes. I read a text from my aunt that they had a bunch of sewing magazines from Germany called Burda when she was younger and that is where my great grandmother got her patterns from.
This will be it for human fashion, since the people of this story don't play as large of a role as the animals and I have a pretty good picture of what they used to wear.
Forget-Me-Nots
Exploration
Now I started exploring what I can do to bring this story to life by testing and combining different mediums and see what works best for me and the book. I want to take inspiration from both the older and newer books both when it comes to the art style and colouring.
I busted out the watercolours as a start and made a couple of small images and tests.
These are a couple of my analogue tests I did early. I used ink for the outlines and watercolours to colour it in. Earlier in the process I wanted to lean more towards doing it completely in watercolour, ink and maybe a bit of paint but later I started To shift a bit to another direction. I became unsure about doing it completely like that but still use the medium in another way. But I decided to let that come to me later. Maybe if I started working on the main animals it would manifest.
Gibba Gibb
When I was designing the main animal of the book, a lamb named Gibba Gibb I was first doing her a bit more realistic look for her but the more I sketched her she became more cartoony and was breaking down her fundimental shapes. Triangular head, square body, tiny nose compared to adult sheep.
When drawing the Icelandic sheep its good to keep in mind that they don't look like clouds with legs at all, they kinda look like combed mops or unraveled wooly yarn. Very itchy coats.
(Example)-->
The babies however have a soft curly like fur, not wool, so doing her with curly texture would be nice.
When going the cartoonish route I initially looked towards the cute 50-60s easter like lamb that could fit into a baby's nursery. Thick hooves, cloud like wool and very cheery and "frolicky".
This lamb however in the story has a very tragic beginning but a happy end so drawing the lamb like these wasn't going to fit for me. It was too carefree.
I wanted her to look lie you'd feel extra bad for her when she's sad but still be able to look cute and genuinely happy when she is supposed to be.
In stead of the cloud like lambs like the ones above I kinda went the opposite route in her design.
Small hooves, hairy fur/wool, a bit longer snout and pointier ears.
You can see the initial attempts in making the lamb look like the ones above in this picture.
I ultimately decided on the top left one. It screams cute, meek and baby (one of the additional inspos for the lamb was this style of babies from 60s cartoons like the one in Tom and Jerry with the hair swoops)
Here she is in digital with watercolour texture I made. Maybe this is the way to go? Maybe use a different method in drawing the lamb?
I am however happy with this version of her, who knows maybe she'll look different later.
I attempted to make the background in watercolour and digitally edited it. Don't know about this but I would like to explore it further, maybe get better scans of the watercolour.
Rósalind/Rosie
Now I wanted to have a go at Gibba's adoptive mother Rósalind (Im going to call her Rosie in the english version).
She's a dark brown cow with a caramel-ish coloured back according my gran described.
She was a well mannered cow and a softie but still the willpower to break out of the fields to get to her baby.
So first I looked at cow patterns and their build. Kinda the same process for when I drew Gibba but for the Icelandic cow.
Here are some of the sketches I made for Rosie. What kinda changes a lot for me is the snout, either I want to do it like a brick or a bit narrower.
I kinda had in mind a bigger, sweet and protective mother figure like the mother in Dumbo or the gorilla mother in Tarzan, both design wise and personality wise. I also kept thinking of Elise the cow, a 1950s-60s cow mascot and a cow book character named Mamma Mö (Mama Moo)
The script
When my grandma sent me the script for the story, her writing was very good but I wanted a bit more looser text. I talked to her about putting in ideas for the writing and told me I was free to write my own version of the script with my tweaks to the flow. So I re-wrote the text, still fatheful to the story but with my own takes to it, giving the animals "dialogue" and thoughts. I wanted to be able to make the text play with the environment and "move" with the characters movements and the shape of the objects and environment.
This is my grans version of the script, it's all in Icelandic though but I plan on writing the book also in English.
This is my version of the script, divided the text into pages to make the storyboards and thumbnails.
First version of the thumbnails and storyboard with my notes scribbled all over the pages.
Definitely very unsure about a lot of the sketches and came up with ideas later after I had drawn the "stand in" drawings. I did make one for my grans script but I don't have it right now.
Second rendition
Third rendition
Im making a 4th rendition and maybe 5th and I am planning on taking the thumbnails that I like from these renditions and polish them into a final storyboard and into a miniature edition of the book as a tester one in ink, one in ink and watercolour and pencil drawings.
A book cover will come when I have finished picking the pages I want for the book.
I was lent some children's books to look at and get more inspiration for.
Thumbnails in colour
Some of my newer thumbnails, more detail, more to come, Im not quite finished with them.
Trying out making the thumbnails in watercolour to figure out the colour scheme and some textures.
The humans aren't as much in the story as Gibba and Rósalind but I wanted to play around with them a tiny bit. Try some clothing patterns.
Mock-ups
Front page and end papers
Im having a bit more of a struggle with the front page but I want to witness back into the theme of flowers in some way throughout the book for example decorate around the numbers and title with flower motifs similar to the patterns seen in the Icelandic national costume for women, also known as "Upphlutur", "Peysuföt" or "Skrautbúningur"
For the endpapers I first thought of a field with Gibba alone in it and in the last end paper it would be her and Rósalind. I thought the picture looked too repetitive (ironically) of the pages in the book and wanted to do something different to break up the repeating look inside the book. I tried making up a pattern in the. spirit of the Icelandic wooly sweater with lambs in it but it became to much for a simple end paper.
I checked out some end papers from around that time and liked the repeating ones with characters and made a line of lamb shiluettes playing and Gibba being the only one looking different.
I tried also playing with that by only having Gibba alone on the first end paper and in the last one she's with Rósa.
I didn't want to tell too much on the front page but just enough to make it interesting. First I wanted to try and show off the landscape but it looks a bit boring. The second one I tried making it just with Gibba lost in a sea of grass and really tiny. Wasn't too sure about it. I do like the small one with Gibba and Rósalind walking on the letters. It's a different version of the first one but making it bit more fun. The last one I like the most and am leaning more to that one. I want to think about these pages more thoroughly later and focus on the story pages right now.
The front and end papers Im choosing to go along with at this moment. might change in the future.
Mockup mark 1
This is the first mockup of the book, a number 2 is being made with watercolour paper instead, it sometimes felt like this paper was good enough but sometimes it was frustrating (I mean it's not watercolour paper, can't really blame it).
There are many things I would like to change about these images, in some I moved the objects and characters around in procreate to make them more to my liking and feel more right.
Mockup mark 2 progress so far
These are the furthest along pages of mockup 2, the others are still in progress. Along with them I've started making postcards for a side project along with mini clay sheeps.
What the pages will look like
Pages with text
This is what the pages could look like when fully ready for publishing. I want to remake them to look as best as possible. The ones I made are fine but would like to make them again to make them perfect in the future.
I want to take a trip with my grandmother to the actual farm to get a good feel for the place and take pictures to reference the landscape better. For now ai think the layout of the pages and images is alright but I want to do it better. Im not really feeling some these pages and want to do it as perfectly as I can. This is at least my proof of concept for this book and would gladly like to produce it for real in the near future. For now they look like this but some might be changed in the future.
Pages without text
