It is December! I procrastinated so long, the MATS course is already over by a month. So here we go: All about week four, and how created a double page spread.

If you want to read everything from the beginning, I suggest you start here:

1. Can I illustrate a Children’s Book?

2. Creating a character

3. About Disappointment and giving myself a little more Grace

4. Expressions and Emotions - Mine and my Characters

Designing and illustrating a double page spread!

Week four of Illustrating Children’s Books had us working on a page spread. This was daunting, as I had one million ideas in my head, but I still wanted to include everything I had learned so far. Not the easiest task at hand. Most MATS students love this week, as it is about giving your whole imagination room to emerge, but I rather dreaded it because it meant a looooot of work and not nearly enough time at hand to pull this off.

I started with a couple of roughs and mapped out different ideas, different scenes and scenes. The text was already a guideline to the page turn, and I ended up with these sketches in the end.

From those roughs, I went on to colouring some of them in to get a feeling for the mood I wanted to create. At this point, I was still reworking my character from the last weeks, and it was not so easy to move on to a full page while not knowing how the character would turn out in the end. But I went with what was on my mind.

Can you see how I tried to convey a certain mood with the images? I had a lot of fun with the textures and the colours, but that did not make it easier to decide on a scene to go forward with. The turning point came when I was thinking about the cinematic effects of images, and realized how much I liked the contrast between a cosy bedroom and a snowy dark outside. From the viewer’s perspective, this seemed the most interesting. So I started to work on the details and colours from there. At one point I had to change the format, because I went with a horizontal double page, which was very large for the presentation in the MATS image gallery. For presentation purposes only, I changed it to a vertical page spread, but that cropped some of my space for the background.

I added the text that was supposed to go on this spread, and modified the outside to make it readable. The last image was the one I submitted, and by that time I was just happy I did it. It is still kind of crazy to see how every page develops, and to retrace the steps it took me to get there.

This week’s assignment also provided a lot of learning points:

• Think about the gutter

• Make space for the text

• Think of an interesting angle

It was fun to design and illustrate those pages, and dip deep into my imagination, but it also was hard time-wise. Five days were not enough to deliver my best work - especially while still figuring out a certain style. But that my friends might be another learning point.

After the course was finished, I took some time and revised the page, bringing it back to the original format. Let me know what you think and stay tuned for part five, the last part on the MATS Illustrating Children’s Book Course.