Final Project Journal

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THE 'JESUS WAS...'

CHILDREN'S BOOKS SERIES

WEEK 1 January 9-16

I completed a base outline for male and female characters.

WEEK 2 January 16-23

I completed my character design for Jesus, and began working on designing the other characters.

WEEK 3 January 23-30

I have roughly completed 1/3 of the characters needed for my first story and have began working on backgrounds. I am feeling pretty confident in my process. The creation of the characters will definitely be the longest part of this project, but I feel like I've got a good base design which allows me to easily make different characters and give them personality with little effort and time invested. I am trying to create the people who were closest to Jesus first, his inner circle per say, and I also went ahead and made Matthew. For example, I have already created (from left to right) Simon Peter, Matthew, James, and John. I am planning to make the rest of his friends next, including Judas, Mary Magdalene, Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and the rest of the disciples. Once I create these characters I will have to create some alternative poses as well, such as them turning to the side, reaching out their hands, etc. I have given myself on my Project Proposal until February 13th to complete all of the characters and their alternative poses, that gives me two more weeks from this journal. I am very excited to complete my characters and start adding them to backgrounds along with adding the scripture.

WEEK 4 January 30-Feb 6

I got behind this week on my progress due to having to write two journal entries this week. It’s pretty difficult to try and make the 250 word count. The journal entries will definitely be easier once I get to including scripture for the stories, but for now writing so many words about the drawings is somewhat difficult. Maybe I’ll start describing who the characters were to Jesus if I keep struggling with the journals. This week I completed the women for my story ‘Jesus Was A Good Friend’. He helped (from left to right) Mary Magdalene and Martha and Mary of Bethany in different ways. I was hoping to create Lazarus, their brother as well this week but got a little behind with the journals and figuring out how to design the women characters. I think I’m gonna start working on outlines for the characters at home so once I get to school I can just trace them on Adobe and color them. I think I might have to extend the character design by a week or two, but that’s fine because I already built time into my project schedule for something like this. Next I plan on making Lazarus, Judas, and the rest of the disciples.

WEEK 5 Feb 6-13

This week I decided to start on the covers for my two books. The character designs were taking quite a while and I felt like I wasn’t getting as much done as I should have, as I’ve only made their front views and no alternative poses, so I wanted to feel like I was getting more progress done. I also made the title “font” I’m going to use for the books by hand drawing it with the mouse to make a crayon affect. I wanted it to be simple for kids to real it and learn how to spell it. My first book cover for ‘Jesus Was A Good Friend’ features Jesus, Simon Peter, John, and James on the cover behind a mountain background. I want to try to keep the backgrounds somewhat simple but still colorful, as the characters are the main focus and have taken a lot of time. My second book cover for ‘Jesus Was A Human Too’ will also feature a different mountain background with a field of flowers. Jesus will be bending down to hand a bunch of flowers to a child, and the child will be reaching out to grab them. I decided to make the child on the cover based on my boyfriends baby brother, as that is who I am going to give the first book to. I think it would be cool for him to see himself in the story.

WEEK 6 Feb 13-20

This week I have finally completed my two front covers for my books and my back cover. I am very proud of the progress I have made so far, next I am going to focus on making the coloring pages and maze which should not take long at all. I would also like to go ahead and complete the beginning and ending pages which will include a different Bible verse for the front and back pages which pertains to the story. After all of this, I will have the rest of the semester to solely focus on the creation of the story pages. I like that I decided to go this route, because it was getting overwhelming wondering how I was going to do all of this before the deadline, but now I have the basics out of the way which allows me to solely focus on my story. The vast majority of the characters are completely finished, and I’ve decided instead of making side poses for all of them, I will just make alternate poses based on which I will need for the specific story. For the story pages of the book, I will have to make many different backgrounds. However, the simplistic child like style I chose should allow me to make the backgrounds fairly quickly, and I’m really excited about that step because I think I will have a lot of fun with it.

WEEK 7 Feb 20-27

This week I got a lot of progress done and have finally finished all the extras of my book, so now I can finally start working exclusively on the story pages. I have completed both covers for my books, along with a back cover, two activity pages which includes a coloring page and a maze game, and I have completed the verse pages to put in the front and back of the book which pertains to the stories. I am now currently working on finishing up the background scenes for the story pages. After this process is finished, all that will be left to do is add my completed characters to the page and add the text for the story. I have been looking around at the scripture and have a general idea of which stories I am going to use. I believe that Week 8 will consist of the majority of the story writing at home and then completing the background scenes in class. I’m very excited to be so far in this process halfway through the semester, I could have been a lot farther if I have been working at home as well. However, this is how far I have come working every day in class, and it has given me plenty of time to perfect these two books, and might even give me the ability to make a third one.

WEEK 9 Mar 13-20

This week I am finally getting to the story writing part of my project. I have created two Google Docs for each of my books and am listing the topics that I would like to cover, and then providing a summary and then citing examples from the scripture in case parents would like to read the actual passage from the Bible. I want to do roughly 12 pages per book, but we will see where it goes. I feel like 12 is a good number though. I am making pretty good progress now that it is later in the week. I wanted to include EVERY example from the scripture of my topics, but that was proving to be really hard. There isn’t just one article that has every example of something specific that Jesus did, so I was having to look around and research a lot which was taking a lot of time. I was getting worried that I wouldn’t be able to put every example that I wanted into the book. However, I started looking into ChatGPT the other day and found out that it works so perfectly for what I am needing! I can give simple commands such as “Look up every example in the Bible of Jesus being hungry, tried, patient, forgiving, etc…” and it provides every single verse that includes such a thing! And it only takes two seconds to process! It was taking me roughly 30 minutes to find all of the information I needed for just one topic before. Especially since I don’t know a lot of scripture, it has been a challenge knowing where to look for specific stories, but ChatGPT just made the learning process so much easier. I am really excited to see how this works out going forward!

WEEK 10 Mar 20-27

This week I am finishing up the information needed on my two Google Docs I have created for each of my books. I am still using ChatGPT to help me find examples from the scripture. I have also started creating the pages for each example. I am still trying to figure out the color scheme with these, because some subjects are very somber and serious, and I'm not wanting to use bright and fun colors on these pages. One of the big challenges I've had this week is trying to figure out how to make the more bland colors go along well with the bright ones used in the covers and characters. I suppose that I could just adjust the overall tint/shading of the character once put on the page, so that it can blend in with the background but maintain unity. I am still also trying to figure out how I want to set up these pages and where I am going to place the text. I am hoping to knock out a lot of these pages next week, because after that, the rest of this project will consist of placing the right characters on the pages to complete the story. This will take a lot of time, because even though I have all of the character models done, I still need to make some different poses for the characters to make the story make sense and not be so stiff. But after that, all I have left to do is digitally publish and print!! Right now I have 13 subjects planned for each of my books, that is 26 pages in total that I need to create. So far I have completed 2 of them,

WEEK 11 Mar 27-Apr 3

This week I discovered an amazing feature that is going to help me a lot through my illustrating process. Apparently Photoshop has a feature where you can not only transform size and shape, but you can also warp the dimensions of individual sections of the object. It is in the interpolation settings under warp modes. Using this feature, I can adjust small facial features on my characters without distorting their entire head, making it easy to have them looking a certain direction such as Jesus looking to the top right in this image. This will save me a lot of time because now I won't have to redraw an entire character to change a slight little feature or have them pointing in a different direction! This along with ChatGPT have been two of the biggest tools that have helped me during this process. I have currently completed 3 pages for the ‘Jesus Was A Human Too’ book, and I only have about 8 more pages to go until I am completely finished with that book. I have gotten behind on my process, and will have to work at home in order to complete my second book. I probably won’t be able to send the pages out and have them professionally printed like I wanted to before the presentation is due, but I will be able to print them on regular paper at the library and staple them together at least.

WEEK 12/13 Apr 3-14

This week I have come to terms with the fact that I will not have enough time to complete my second book, 'Jesus Was A Good Friend.' However, I have made a lot of progress on my current book 'Jesus Was A Human Too.' So far I have fully completed six story pages, and have completed 12 pages in total including the covers and activity pages, and 15 in total including everything I have made for both books. I haven't come as far as I would like, but I'm content that at least I will have enough content to create a decent presentation. This project has really taught me a lot about time management regarding projects. It is a tough thing to master. I thought I would have been a lot better at sticking to the project plan I originally made at the beginning of this semester, but something always gets in the way. This has been a great way to get some insight into what it might be like working on a project for a company, and how important it is to stick to a project plan and manage your time well.

WEEK 14 April 14-21

This week, with only two weeks left to go, I am wrapping up the projects that I currently have finished. My ultimate goal in all of this was to come out of it with one physical completed book, and I will achieve that. However, I didn’t get the second book that I wanted to complete, and I won’t be able to send my completed book to a company to get a hard cover and glossy page print like I originally was going to due to time and money constraints. I’m still going to try to upload a digital version of the final book somewhere if I can figure that out. This week I have completed all of the basic pages that I wanted to include in ‘Jesus Was A Human Too’, and now coming up on week 14 I am going to jam pack even more content into this one since I was unable to create a second. And then I plan on printing the pages out and stapling them to make a book, and I will probably have to use double sided tape to make the pages front and back. So far for my book, I have the following topics about the things that Jesus experienced: how he was born with a human body, how he had to work hard throughout his life, how he had a sense of humor, he was tempted, and felt stress and overwhelm, and he felt love and compassion.

WEEK 15 April 21-28

Finally to the finish line! This week I have finally gotten the opportunity to print out one of my books! I was worried because my original plan was to send my pages out to a printing company, but I ran short on money and time to go that route. But Mr. Myers came in clutch! I submitted my pages to him and he was able to print them out front and back on some really nice quality card stock paper. The colors came out amazing, which I was worried about, and the size is perfect! We were able to staple the sides together to bind the pages. It ended up looking really amazing, and I am so glad that I chose this type of project. It is a trip to see what you’ve been working so hard on on a computer turned into an object that you and actually touch. Another thing that I completed this week was my plan for my second book. I’ve decided that I will make ‘Jesus Was a Good Friend’ into a coloring book for children featuring all of Jesus’ friends. At least this is what it will be for now for this project presentation until one day I can make it into an actual story book. But this was I get to use the pages and covers I’ve already made for that and character outlines and not let all that time and work go to waste!

Get in Touch

@mjmcclure2004@gmail.com @maryj42186@students.cccti.edu

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