The Nitty Gritty: Illustration for Sand County Look Book

From: Tanit

To: Fionn

Cc: Tommy

Date: December 1, 2009 11:27:07 PM EST

Subject: Post-Thanksgiving Potbelly

Man, don’t get me started on the potbelly thing.  Glug!

OK - my thoughts on all of the below…

Tommy has some supernatural ability to track down cool and bizarre found photos, so rather than my poor excuse for that, I propose, if you’re comfortable with it, maybe making some drawings of this Passenger Pigeon, (let’s call her Martha, after the very last one) from different angles - kind of the way you did with the star logo, but similar stylistically, as opposed to the different types of stars. Tommy can then find the landscapes and use your bird from different perspectives and distances.

How’s that sound?  I’m not totally positive we’ll end up taking the pigeon/Aldo Leopold quote approach for the Look Book intro.  But let’s at least see how it looks.  It could be really beautiful.

On the other hand, since we want to establish this comic book approach as a way of integrating photo, illustration and our human characters - maybe this will seem like a separate story line and become confusing(?).  Well, if you’re game to give it a try, we’ll see how it all fits together.

I emailed Nate to ask him for some high res of the group shot.  To me, the composition of that shot just isn’t right for it to work as a stand-alone photo. The people are way too close together.  But if it becomes an illustration/photo hybrid - then I think it just might work, because the illustration takes some of the “pressure” off of the photo to be just right.

I could see you maybe cropping in and dealing with sections of the shot, rather than trying to treat it all as one image. Maybe crops of feet or faces, or just smaller chunks in the group.

If you can work on that and the bird, we’ll have a few main pieces taken care of and that will be great.

I’m not sure what to do about shots of just the set, without people, as I don’t really have any of those.  But I think the approach you took where you integrated illustration into more abstract shots - like crops of feet, etc - worked better than trying to place whole characters into the set.  As you noted. :)

If we have the group shot, or parts of the group shot, and then maybe two behind the scenes shots where you’re incorporating illustration into some part of them, with or without people in the actual photos, this should be a really great working start.  I think we’ll have enough to introduce the concept of mixed illustration and photo, that we can then safely use a few pure illustration pages.

With all this done, let’s step back and look at how all the images are working together.  I’m sure we’ll then all decide on a few of the studio shots where we should integrate illustration.  And we can also see what’s missing.  It may turn out that we need illustration over a few of the other “outside” shots - but let’s wait to decide that until we have a rough layout figured out.

OK - quick summary:
- Sketches of Martha
- approach to group shot
- 2-3 other photos, probably from behind-the-scenes, that integrate illustration - as you’ve been doing
- 2-3 panels of straight illustration  - as you’ve already done

Let’s then look at the layout and see what we need.

How does it all sound?  Am loving what you’re doing, scary or cute and cuddly.