How I Compose An Image...

I don't just draw it. Don't get me wrong; most of my images are drawn by hand. The only twist is that, even in the case of something that began as a drawing, none of my finished images are drawn as a whole.

The black, white, and gray hero image at the top of this site is a collage, and until I add a drawing of one of the characters from my novel, it'll remain composed entirely of artwork that was drawn or generated by other artists. The illustration at the top of this blog entry is also a collage, but it was composed entirely of my own artwork, as was the image below, a background from my second picture book, A New Friend For Chanda And Chapal, a story about two lovable East Indian kids who invent an imaginary friend...

All of my images are collages, meaning that they're all composed of individual elements that were all drawn and colored separately before being added together and rearranged using a program called GIMP.

GIMP is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Ironically, GNU is another acronym that stands for something else entirely, but the overall point is that if you don't want to pay a monthly fine (i.e., subscription) for Photoshop, you don't have to, because GIMP is easy to use and 100% free to download if you simply follow the above link.

To clarify my use of GIMP, let me draw your attention to the bookcase in the above image's lower right-hand corner.

I think it was first drawn for one of the articles I wrote/illustrated for The Monarch Review. You can follow this link to read the whole article, or you can see the bookcase again (on the left) in the image below...

It's exactly the same, except for being filled with Sara Lanzillotta's dolls and ceramics rather than Chanda and Chapal's books and toys. And to clarify further, let me show you the bookcase as it was originally drawn, without anything in it...

See? The whole bookcase exists separately from top to bottom, as do Chanda, Chapal, and 100% of the objects in their playroom. Because they were all drawn and inked separately, like this...

The logical question you may be asking yourself is... why? And although the short answer may be laziness, the long answer is time and opportunity.

As of this blog entry, I may have a few picture books available on Amazon and a few posters you can look at on DeviantArt, but I'm by no means a professional writer or illustrator. I'd like to be, but I can only aspire to be until I figure out how to do it full-time. Until then, it's just a labor-intensive hobby.

A New Friend For Chanda And Chapal was written/illustrated while I labored as a dishwasher/pantry cook (in a restaurant that I had to ride the bus to get to). And spending 40 hours a week working (plus ten hours a week bussing) doesn't exactly leave a whole lot of opportunity during the rest of the week to spend time on hobbies. So, by necessity, I try to reuse hand-drawn objects like the bookcase as often as possible. And, in much the same way that an analog animator might do, I also try to reuse my composite backgrounds within a story. Which means that when I write a picture book, I try to write it in the same way that other authors might compose a play, i.e., by focusing on the action/dialogue between players interacting with the props and set on a stage.

Chanda and Chapal's playroom was one of six sets in the book. I used it for a scene that took place over the course of 13 composite illustrations, only changing a few details between illustrations until it was time to change scenes. Here's a sneak peek...

And just for fun, here's a peek of the book when it was still in the storyboard part of the process...

If you click on the above image, you can see an enlarged view of my stick-figure doodles. And I hope you'll be able to see that for the first 13 sections, the story really is just a few characters talking, exactly as one might expect to see in a play.

A common formula for stage plays is something known as the three-act structure. And, believe it or not, it traces its origins all the way back to Aristotle, who wrote a book on the subject for both poets and playwrights. And if you can wade through the poetic license I take with my handwriting, you might also see that my original storyboard ends on the number 27, which might not make sense until you consider that 27 is divisible by three, which makes perfect sense to me, because (like Nikola Tesla) I happen to think that three is a magic number.

I've heard that a lot of children's books are written using formulas based on the number four, and that the magic number (or industry standard) is a grand total of 32 pages. But, although there are reasons for that standard page count in traditional publishing, I didn't have to worry about any of them when I self-published through Amazon, as none of them seemed to apply.

I'll let you know if they ever do, in the meantime, I'd like to show you a few more of the finished pages that my initial storyboard led to...

And if you click to enlarge this image, you can probably see that Chanda, Chapal, and their imaginary friend all enjoy a good laugh at the guru's expense. So, before I continue, and because I think society's self-conscious gestalt is causing suffering at the expense of creativity, I think I should introduce the person that the above guru was based on: Sathya Sai Baba.

Yes, he's East Indian. And no, I'm not. But I wrote a book for an East Indian audience, and in much the same way that I might make fun of the deceased American pastor and televangelist Jerry Falwell, I'm sure that there are a few members of the Indian Rationalist Association who'd be more than happy to make fun of the deceased guru and philanthropist.

For the sake of balance, the story also makes fun of a man from the Indian Rationalist Association (described simply as a scientist), but only in the context that he tries to rationalize the existence of Chanda and Chapal's imaginary friend by using a lot of big, scientific words.

In other words, the story's denouement is that although Chanda and Chapal's perception of their imaginary friend doesn't require an explanation, their perception differs entirely from that of a guru, a scientist, and/or a policewoman.

The exploration of perception is a subject I returned to in my novel, as well as the whole point of my first three websites and blogs. But I think that subject is better reserved for a different blog entry.