Golf with Cats, Pt. 2: Doing It Live in Green Purgatory

At this point of the process, I had already imagined a green void. Our characters existed in a purgatory of green-yellow grass, so every page had SOMETHING and the characters weren't on a blank page. This idea of blurring details between subjects is important in a lot of my work, funnily. It's not something I necessarily intend when going into a project, but it's how my brain sorts priority. So while I focused on finding the characters, I held onto this pocket dimension of grass for them to live in.

Now, thankfully this is a children's book and it's educational, so there are some boundaries I got to work within that kept things relatively simple when it came to the environment. The focus should be on what's important. We want everyone to feel as if they're on a golf course without any of the attention being taken from the lesson. We want the usual suspects to make their appearance. There should be a distinction in the patterns of the grasses on the course. We can tell what's rough by the color of its mass, and likewise we can tell that there's a collar around each green, and that the tee area is its own space, all without explicitly stating it each time. We determined pretty early on that consistency in the palette would hammer home the concepts throughout the book.

Originally we talked about a sort of side-scrolling adventure style map, where the entire book was illustrated as one long running page that spans the entire golf course, and while that idea got scrapped early, it did inform the overall orientation of the book.

Having the pieces established and the rules in place made building pages much simpler. First off, we would use our green purgatory as the foundation of all environments, and building on top of that, I would place background elements and work my way to the foreground. So I could set out our established "green," place our coach, and drop a hole in without much thought. Building in this way allowed me to create some depth in a relatively flat world.

As I started working through each page with our props, it started to click in place, but of course, there are things I would change next time. We went into this project all novices without much sense of order of operations, and I was in charge of figuring it out as the person building the book. If I were to do everything again, I would have probably started off like a playwright. Establish each scene as a vignette and storyboard each section. This time though, we did it live, literally. We'd jump on Zoom as a group and discuss the things I built, nudging and adjusting details and discussing further what we wanted for each page.

For anyone familiar with illustration, yes, I know. It's been a learning process.

← Pt. 1: Out of Body on the Golf Course | Next: Pt. 3: Storm Clouds at the Finish Line →