Venner for altid (second post): Making the book

We are working on another issue of our magazine. And when I´m not working on the magazine, I´m making drawings for an 31 day drawing challenge we have started with a few friends here at Grimerud. Lots of fun, and a nice challenge.

In this post, I wanted to show you some of the sketches and drawings that I made for «Venner for alltid», the christian book about relationships, love and sex. In the whole process of making the book like this, a lot of ideas are started, developed and eventually discarded. Improving on ideas is as good as coming up with good ideas. The difficult part is to know how to decide which idea is better than the other, and the long and short communication-bits in-between those decisions.

These were the first sketches I did for the book. In the introduction, Gunnleik talks about how he wanted to jump off a roof, but his friend warned him that he would break his leg. Gunnleik does´t listen, jumps and breaks his leg. Moral of the story: listen to good advice before someone gets crippled for life. I thought it would be fun to draw both guys as pirates, and then the Gunnleik-pirate would end up with a peg-leg. I think, in the end, the whole funny pirate-idea diverted too much fromt he story.

These were sketches for the chapter that talks about the importance of being good to everyone around us, opposite to being selective, and just be good to the people that we like to be good to. I´ve tried to make a schoolyard version of story of the good samaritan, where the outsider is shown as the right example of charity. Interestingly, they answer Jesus gives to the question of: «who is my neighbour», is «you are the neighbour, you are everyone´s neighbour».
I forgot why this idea did´t make it in, but in the end we ended up with a picture of an old man tying the shoelaces of a random young boy int he street. That´s also a nice thing to do.

These are a few pages of sketches I made to figure out the right angle and composition, for the two drawings that show the bible-story of Jesus and the woman caught in adultry. As you can see in my previous post, one of the sketches made it into the book. Thecomposition I was looking for was one that would involve the reader in the story, so that they would not only see a picture, but feel that they were present in the same story themselves.

The initial idea was that there was going to be an full colour illustration on the cover of the book, of a young boy and girl who are doing fun stuff together, just being good friends. But then, when the cover-picture was done, they thought it made the book look like a children´s book or a novel, instead of a thematic book for teenagers about relationships and love and stuff. So, the drawings got dropped and a stock-photo got used instead.