NAOMI X EUN:
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The essence of the Taya! Special Project is to create a children's storybook that will incorporate musical concepts into the grasp of preschool children, typically aged 4 to 5 years old. Together, Naomi and Eun created a bilingual story that is deeply rooted in Filipino culture. This is the documentation on the entire project from Day 1 until the last day of printing. This project was created from September until December 2015 on a staggered basis.
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Project Background
Late in July 2015, I was approached by my cousin Naomi for a project required of her to finish her course. Naomi, who has commissioned me on several occasions in the past for her graphic designing needs, was in her 5th year of Bachelor of Music in Music Education at that time. Presently, she is a a graduate of the University of the Philippines (Diliman) College of Music, where I used to take voice lessons in the college's extension program back in 2009. I was taking an extracurricular class at that time so I rejected her offer; I prefer focusing on one thing at a time so I was afraid my work would not be as excellent if I were to juggle it with my classes. Yet when August came, she finally convinced me to accept the offer.
Conceptual Framework of the Story
"The objective of the storybook is to teach the concept of loudness (loud vs soft), duration (long vs short), and timbre to preschool-aged children. These concepts are integrated to the story... intended to be performed using percussion instruments designed for children... It aims to introduce traditional Philippine games, namely Habulan, Sawsaw Suka, Tagu-taguan, and Tumbang Preso... as well as Maiba - taya! The storybook hopes to encourage children that being the "taya" or "it" is not bad - it can actually be something to look forward to!" (Taya!, 2015, p.32). The special project would serve as Naomi's thesis for her course and so I assumed that it was important to work with someone with some sort of musical background; someone who had a firm grasp on the concepts that would be conveyed to the young readers of the book. As a musician myself, I decided to take on the challenge to illustrate my first storybook. Here's how it went:
First Character Sketches
The story revolves around 5 Pinoy children; Tin-tin, Pipoy, Mimay, Kiko, and the main character, the "taya" or "it". Here are the first character sketches which I drew; not all of them made it into the story, while others went through some drastic changes.
I have to admit that I am not the best at drawing cartoon characters - as a matter of fact, this project hurled me towards an art form that I was not very familiar with. For years and years, I have focused on the art of portrait drawing, and illustrating believable humanistic features has always been my field of expertise. This was the only the first of the many challenges I encountered with this project.
Initial Character Digitalization
The method I used for this project was very straightforward: draw freehand, scan, digitalize on Illustrator CS6, and render the rest in Photoshop. Drawing freehand came very easily to me since my sketches were done quickly, only a few minutes were spent on each page. I deliberately drew each character separately (even if they were together on the same page) so I could digitalize, polish, and render them all separately without disturbing the other elements (background, scenes, etc.) The work done in Illustrator is very vague and is as simple as it can get; the hair was one big block of color, and so were the eyes, clothes, skin, etc. All the magic came to life thrugh Photoshop where I added details like shadows, highlights, grass, gradients, and indistinct paint splatters that you wouldn't notice unless you look closely.
Initial Character Rendering
Every scene on every page of this book was brought to life through Photoshop. Gradients, shadows, inward highlights, noise, brushes - this project definitely exhausted all of my resources (my brushes, patterns, gradients, textures are more than 800. I have 1,200 fonts in stock on my computer.)
Main Character Rendering
And here we have the "taya" or the "it", whom Naomi chose not to name. He is definitely my favorite character to draw and render (next is Mimay, his smiling companion who gets tagged next). I deliberately chose to zoom in and crop into p.4 (which is considerably his debut page) because I couldn't help but be amazed at the detail that was put into him, especially his clothes and his face. I spent a couple of hours rendering his facial skin alone. I also chose to give a little violet gradient to his eyebrows to accentuate his cartoon look. If you look closely at his clothes, you can see faint splatters of mud and dust which gives more of an amplified feeling that he is indeed part of the Manila landscape of children playing in the streets.
Rendered Pages
Final Result
It felt amazing when I saw the first print of Taya (See below, left side). Our first copy was a humongous tome that was primarily designed to be used for storytelling in a classroom of children (see Taya! Pilot Storytelling). The remaining 6 copies were later on used for the Taya! Book Launch and Workshop. I remember having a feeling of fulfillment when I first saw our work in print. Not only did I spent countless hours to create this (I sometimes started at 2PM and went to bed at 7AM the next day), but this project pushed me to tackle new challenges head-on with measures I have never tried before. Who would've thought that a 17 year-old could illustrate such a unique and idiosyncratic book? Taya! is definitely a book that is one-of-a-kind and has never been seen before. It is definitely a pioneer in a new genre of children's books, proving that storybooks are not just about art or literature; storybooks can be a tool that will help children grasp lessons in a way that has rarely been done before.
Spotted: UP Diliman College of Music
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