Well if everything is on track "Why Am I Me?" should be out in April. So I thought I might start showing the break down on how I put this book together. I have written in the past it all starts with the text.
Written by Wayne Harris-Wyrick, published by 4RV Publishing.
This is the first time I illustrate a question "Why am I me?" and I don't think by adding this quote I am giving anything away "I have a question. It is a big question. A really big question".
Wayne is asking the audience to solve one of the most ask question outside of Whats for dinner?
Wayne has done a great job allowing the words to flow from one sentence to the next I would have to say seamless. They do carry you from one page to the next; so I needed to be just as creative.
When I started reading the text I was trying to come up with a single character who would keep the audience company through out the book. But the more I reread the text the less that was happening, I kept seeing more and more faces asking this question. It is "A Really Big Question" and I felt it needed to be voiced by many.
Commuting to work on NYC Subways were you see hundreds of faces different sizes and colors may have had something to do with what I was feeling about the characters, why should only one person ask this question? So my new challenge was to create many faces to ask this question, in some ways it made things easier I didn't have to worry about recreating the same person over and over again. But not creating the same character over and over again made it difficult for the same reason each face needed to be fresh every scene needed to be different I felt I was on the Disney ride "It's a small world".
No reuse of backgrounds or or color schemes, there is a total of 31 pages of artwork for this book that is including cover art as well as half and full title page and copyright page so 25 is dedicated to the story and even though I used mostly double page spreads it still comes out to be a lot of personalities.
The sketches are from the book not the whole book but it does give you an idea of how the book flows.
