NaNoWriMo- MidMonth Update!

Old Mother Goose, when she wanted to wander, 

Would ride through the air on a very fine gander.

 

 So this is my midmonth NaNoWriMo update. As previously discussed, writing a book is not an option for me (unless it's a good thing to chase your son through the snow with an ax), therefore I decided to tackle a 32 page children's book (30 pages of which had illustrations). My idea was that these illustrations were just like the rough drafts that my writer friends are completing. As long as the basic illustration was done, I wasn't going to worry about nitty-gritty things like specific colors (especially because colors are so easy to change in Illustrator). Most of my illustrations started like this:

Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard to get her dog a bone

(and that dog is one crazy MoFo.)

 A few of the details are missing- there should be a cat and possibly a newspaper floating somewhere around her feet- the colors are ridiculously bad (Why is the wall orange? Orange walls are silly.), and the water's not even close to done, but at least I know where everything goes. And I got so into the one with the rodents, it's almost done (Why do I love the little furry critters so much?)

Three Blind Mice-

Mice and jetpacks, what's not to love?

The problem is I can't keep up the pace and sometimes getting them to this level takes too long and too much energy. Also, it's incredibly hard to design spaceships and half of my designs have spaceships. It's day 15 and I have only 10 pages done. I've had to reevaluate the level that is acceptable to me as "first draft." So I'm going to mock up the book in "sketch" form. I say sketch skeptically because my sketches are truly awful Frankensteinian monsters of awkward drawings and photo reference.  For example the two pages I did yesterday:

Little Bo Peep- Silly sheep, what are you doing in space?

You should be flying the spaceship.

I feel like I just showed you my underpants (please don't judge me).

Obviously a lot happens after this stage when I move into illustrator.

My hope is if I can knock out all the compositions, I can start getting into Illustrator and maybe have a few more in the beginning stages of getting colored in.