Assignment 7: The birth of BoyBot

The grand finale, the final assignment, am so looking forward to it. Realized why this assignment needed such a long period. A lot of researches were needed. Probably age is a factor, cannot remember when I last read an illustration book. Went to the library as well as asked my kid sister for illustration books as reference.

Putting ourselves the shoe of a 6-9 year old kid, Sheryl and I decided to come up with a story on robot. Unlike our time, kids nowadays tend to like more futuristic stuff, thus the idea. Besides being an illustration book, we want to engage our readers, by having some fun-filled activities. With reference to “Where’s Wallace” by Hilary Knight and “Where’s Waldo” by Martin Hanford, we decided to incorporate picture puzzle in our story book.

As time was pressing, we came up with a very simple story plot and sketches. Looking in different perspective of drawing robot, we decided on a curvier robot to remove the boring rectangular feel and BoyBot was born. Beside BoyBot, we also have to decide on the development of other characters. Other characters developed are the father, mother and pet dog of BoyBot. Understand that drawing subjects with expression was difficult, therefore we try to minimize the introduction of too many character. The first sketch of BoyBot was pretty well done, however, as we developed subsequence pages, BoyBot was getting out of shape and the feel tends to differ. Finally we managed to convince ourselves that by digitalizing our character, this problem of standardization would be solved, and we were back to work.

Presenting to the class our sketches, response was good regarding the characters. The class felt that the characters were children friendly enough. Therefore we will be sticking to our character. However, the story would need further development to give more flowing rhythm and more exercises were needed to better entail the reader. So it was back to the storyboarding.