Paper Pals was created as my semester-long project at the University of Toronto Scarborough with the course VPSC56H3 (Studio Practice and Exhibition) and was exhibited at our student exhibition, Metamorphosis.
Paper Pals is my first children’s book that represents the value of friendship. From a very early age, I learned the importance of friendship from a beautiful memory that was used as inspiration to create this book. Through simple illustrations intended for children to read, I wanted to include a simple, yet impactful lesson that I’ve carried with me throughout my life. What began as a school assignment, turned into a passion project beyond the course.
These are some of the initial sketches of the characters and layouts I did to get started after I decided on the theme of the story.
Learning and practicing character expressions helped me develop the drawings of Remona and Ellen in the story.
The scriptwriting process took half of the semester. With helpful feedback from my professor, peers, and editor, I was able to further improve the writing of the book. There were about 7-8 drafts before choosing the final one.
Sketching out a couple of page layouts helped me brainstorm the layout for each page as per the script. I tried to challenge myself to imagine and draw different layouts and ideas, to keep the story visually appealing.
After the initial sketches, they helped me to form the line art. Line art helps me to picture where to add the colour.
After the line art, I added in the colours. Watching painting tutorials and reading art books helped me to start learning about light and color, and paint the pages.
Paper Pals at Metamorphosis Exhibition, 2024.
