Alamat ng Butiki (Legend of the house lizard) would be my second children’s book to illustrate. (If you don’t count the Night Monkeys cover). I’ve begun to document the process to see how I can improve the way I work in the future.
The following are studies of the story pages for the 14 spread book. It is the story of how the butiki came to be. A story of lust, murder, and a mother’s love. Needless to say the story is darker than most titles of Lampara Books. In fact it’s darker than most children’s books out in the Philippine market! Jun Matias of Lampara opted for my style to complement the book due its more realistic, if not mature, nature.
It took less than a day to finish the thumbnails for the story pages. Although other pages requiring more design such as the interior covers, credit & copyright pages, and exterior covers were done another day. However, I didn’t realize that Lampara Books had expected it all in at the get-go. No biggie, we were fortunate enough to work with email.
Alamat ng Butiki is part of a series of legends that are all undergoing production at this moment. So a paramater for this project is that the title fonts (and apparently the inside fonts as well) have to match across all the books in the series. I had already designed the text for the front cover before I was told this… but in any case, if they change their mind I will get to use the text I designed.
And since this is part of a series, the editors will be pretty busy dishing out feedback, among other things. I realized I had to followup for myself on the studies’ s approval… because it had been one week already and I had not received comments. It was only after I sent a followup email that Edith from Lampara gave me Jun’s comments. So remember to followup for yourself, editors are busy people.
