Glass One
This past weekend I dove into designing the book for my illustrated version of “The Great Gatsby” once again. After letting it sit around, for somewhere around half a year, because I hated the book design I made for it I finally got going on it last month. Now I’m working on even more ideas for it and keep giving myself more work.
Last time I wrote about Gatsby I mentioned the vines and drinking glasses that I drew. Well, I’ve already abandoned the vine idea but the drinking glasses live on. I figured that I could use the glasses in one of the party chapter and that lead me to thinking about things I could use for the other chapters.
The first thing I thought of was grass. In the first chapter there is a description of Tom and Daisy’s house that includes a very vivid description of the lawn and how it runs up form the street, over things, and then ends at the house. So I decided to draw some grass.
I drew the grass digitally in Adobe Illustrator and made about ten different versions of grass. It was grass as seen in a side view where I drew individual blades as shapes and drew them at three different heights on three different layers. This way I could mix and match them.
After I had enough grass drawn I decided to set them up at the bottom of the page in the first chapter. As I put them in the pages I thought that the grass should grow in height as the pages turned. So I strung and the grass together in a thirty inch wide file and made the grass on the right a little bit taller. Then I brought it into the design document bit by bit. Now the grass grows as the pages turn.
The next thing I did was water. There is a big water theme in Gatsby especially in the last chapter. So I made a bunch of marker and watercolor drawings of water. Water like in an ocean or lake. “A corrugated surface” as they say in the book. I think these came out alright but I may still have some more work to do on them. That’s the story of this project.
Glass Two
In chapter two there is a mention of windows so I decided to make some windows. I made about twenty of them so each page could have one in the lower outside corner. I thought it worked well except nothing ran across the bottom of the page like the lawn did. It was just the corners. So I added a couple of lines and some texture between the windows to indicate a wall. I thought this made things look better.
I think I had only made about ten drinking glasses at this point so I decided to make about fifteen more so I could put a unique one in the corner of the pages I did that and I thought it looked pretty good.
Next I made bottles. I thought that they would look good in another of the part chapters. I decided to run them across the bottom with two bigger bottles on either end. I made the smaller ones that run across the bottom in grey so they’d fade back a little. I rotated the end bottles that I would use as the two big ones and also rotated the smaller grey line of bottles so that they weren’t the same ones in the same place every page. They looked pretty good.
The next thing I made were some hourglasses. There is a chapter in which time is mentioned and Gatsby leans on a clock so I thought I’d put these at the bottom of that chapter. After making twenty or so hour glasses I put them in place but thought they looked a little sparse. I wanted something like the lines and textures that hinted at a building in the windows one.
I had previously made some digital brush strokes in Adobe Illustrator in an attempt to mimic the real life brush strokes I made in the beginning to look like vines. After some messing around I got these digital brush strokes to remain me a little bit of wind. The winds of time. So I added them in between (and behind) the hour glasses. I think it works.
Glass Three
But now the pages with just the glasses were looking thin. I thought that I would copy the bottle pages and run a bunch of glasses across the bottom in-between the two big ones on the ends. This took some time to set up but the adjustment was worth it in the end.
Another idea I came up with was because of the trip into NYC that Gatsby and Nick made where nick said that anything could happen in the city. I had already drawn a bunch of small thumbnail drawings of all sorts of faces, bodies, and random scenes in my sketchbook. I decided to see if I could use these “Anything goes” bits of drawings.
They were just thumbnail drawings and I was contemplating turning them all into finished drawings but first I just wanted to place them to see what they looked like. I put one on the outside bottom corner of each page. I liked what they looked like but they looked thin compared to the pages that had things all; the way across the bottom of the pages.
This lead me to the idea of running more thumbnails across the bottom but I didn’t have any more in my sketchbook. I didn’t really want to draw more but that brought me to the idea of using my Tiny Drawing. Those are the 1×1.5 inch drawings I’ve made with a face and a single word balloon with a single word in it. Maybe I could run those across the bottom.
It was the single word that tripped me up. If I was going to have a word then it should be one from the book. So I decided to draw all new Tiny Drawings and add a word from the book to them. I decided that I’d need six Tiny Drawings a page (twelve a spread) and I’d probably need around 120 drawings in total.
After I’ve drawn twelve tiny faces I picked one page from chapter four and highlight twelve words on it. Those are the words that I’ll put on the twelve drawings. One word a drawing.
So far I’ve got forty eight Gatsby Tiny drawings done. It’s going to take me a while to get them all done but with no deadline I’ve got time. I’ll let you know how it goes.