Meetings surrounding my book
During early 2016 I came into contact with a lady named Penelope Reilly while working at the Rose Lane branch of Waterstones. Penelope has written a range of children’s books during her spare time that have been locally published and printed. During this encounter I mentioned that I was an illustrator of sorts, I told her that I was studying at Christ Church on the Fine Art course. She took my E-mail address and I didn’t think anything of it.
A few months later, at the beginning of May I received the manuscript for Penelope’s book with a note asking for me to look over it and see how I felt ready for a meeting. After reading the manuscript I instantly felt I could get some work together for it, I emailed Penelope explaining how I felt. She replied saying that she was to be away for a week or so, so we could meet after that.
On the 25th of May we met to discuss my plans and how Penelope felt going forward to try and figure out whether this would work or not. As it went the meeting was a complete success and we managed to come to an agreement for me to go ahead with the work and we would meet back after a month to check on my progress and just see how things were going.
During the meeting we discussed what I got from the manuscript and how I felt these feelings influenced the style I would be looking for. Going into the meeting I had prepared a few different ideas in terms of outcome, purely from my first impressions of the work. Penelope told me there was a few things she wanted from me and we laid out some more drawings as we sat and I told her some of the ideas that I had for certain passages of the story. As this went on we gradually worked through the entire text going passage by passage discussing possibilities for the images. After we had covered the last paragraph and ironed out the last details Penelope wanted to discuss payment outlining exactly what she was looking to pay for my work and we agreed whole heartedly and said that we would arrange the next meeting for a months’ time.
This was a really interesting experience for me to be doing artwork on a paid basis under my own schedule. It began to sink in that I was effectively working through drawing and being paid for my effort. I found this very motivating and trying to find the balance between working carefully and in a timely manner. This carried me through the planning process and the execution of my work and I found that the time soon amounts meaning that even though I was concerned about the time it was taking, I felt confident that I had used my time well and began to look further forward. This came in the form of making plans for potential layouts. As with the initial plans I had made from the manuscript that pe4nelope gave me I found a stable continually working pattern that gradually carried me through the project. I felt that from an efficiency point of view I should consider the overall outcome while creating and laying out the individual illustrations.
This month of planning and completion had been a complete learning curve for me and I know that going forward I could safely say I could professionally timetable my work to reach a consistent level of output. Going into the second meeting on the 24th of June I had created some mocked up versions of some of the potential layouts for Penelope to take away with her as well as bringing all of the original work that I had done to that point. The meeting began by me getting us some hot drinks and taking a seat in the café. From here we proceeded to discuss the outcome of the referendum before getting straight into the meeting. I began quite quickly and I feel I confused things as I started to just talk through what I had done, without matching up each image to its section of the text. After briefly pausing and starting to slow down and talk through the images Penelope really loved my images and expressed extreme happiness in what I had achieved so far. I feel this slight slip up on my part was due to some nerves on my part, doubting my work so far. As it turned out my doubt was unfound and the meeting went swimmingly. We discussed an idea I had had to do with a selection of French phrases in the form of Herve’s school at the back of the book, a small section to teach young children some basic phrases in French. From this we had agreed that Penelope would send me some of the phrases she would like to see used in the books section and she said that the list would be along promptly. Moving forward both sides giving their opinion including an image that Penelope felt she would prefer in a different configuration as she originally pictured it differently. I politely stood by what I had done and suggested that I take another look at the image and try and meet her demands expressing my concern for the effect of the image. This went down extremely well and we agreed to wait and compare the work I had done with any further developments that I had made. Nearing the end of the meeting I we discussed briefly the length of time I had spent on the work so far to which I tried to negotiate downwards as I was afraid of costing Penelope too much. In reply she simply said that it was only fair and was happy to pay the full amount. This led to the end of the meeting and our arranging for another month gap between meetings resulting in the next meeting being held in the last week of July.
On the 20th of July, myself and Penelope met once again but due to work related delay I had not achieved as much progress as hoped. This caused concern in myself as I didn’t feel overly confident on how this would come across. The meeting went ahead ant Penelope was quite satisfied with the work that I had done so far and we used the time we had to work through the manuscript again making sure the direction moving forward at this point was clear, as the book was almost at completion. We spoke excitedly about a few ideas that were still very interesting from the earlier meetings, including the idea to have a few French phrases at the end of the book in the form of Herve’s school. The meeting was incredibly positive and enjoyable, with a few added illustration options for parts of the book that didn’t altogether get covered through our previous meetings. In all though very happily parted both Penny and myself parted confident moving forward. I received a very distressing e-mail from Penny regarding a complete redesign of the main character in the story, following apparent conversations with her family members. This caused me much distress as a total redesign of the main character meant that I would have to redraw much of the almost completed book. This made me feel under quite a lot of pressure as timings in conjunction with the start of university made this a difficult consideration as I didn’t know how long it would take in order to make the changes she requested. After a brief time to come to terms with this request I replied with a positive outlook, having quickly redrawn the character in order to ascertain exactly whether or not this version would do. I feel this was the biggest learning point of the whole illustration project as it had meant all of the work I had done was now superfluous. I feel that in future I will consider doing several character storyboarding sketches in order to hammer out a final agreed design beforehand, in order to avoid a sudden change of heart by the author. Part of the reason this change of heart was so surprising was that she had already approved the whole design and then, out of the blue, changed her mind. This has delivered a valuable, possibly time saving lesson, that will be carried forward in not only any future illustration work but in all commission work I undertake in future.
The recreation of every page followed, with a lot of fine tuning and appreciation toward learning how to format the images into book form, in preparation for our next meeting on the 9th of September. In the week building up to this date I worked incredibly hard in order to create the finished product on a computer program with hopes to work through what I had done with Penelope, hopefully to finish up my working with her, ready to have the book printed.
