Illustrating-Illustrating-Illustrating

This week I have been busy creating illustrations, compositions and layouts for the book aspect of my learning aid game. I wished to make the book (and game) as tactile and visually interesting as possible and so inspired by the work of Sara Fenelli and Oliver Jeffers, I have decided to incorporate scanned textures alongside my digital illustrations, to further create depth and tactile qualities. I feel this technique has been working successfully so far. Bellow are some of illustration spreads I have been working on.

Character development

Following up from my previous post I have now got some images of my final character design outcomes. These were created through a combination of adobe illustrator and adobe photoshop. 

Character development sketches

This week I have been concentrating on character development as I wish to create characters that young children could identify with. The characters names are going to be Ben and Dotti spelt in lowercase and emblazoned with a lower case b & d on the characters respective t-shirts. I have decided upon this as the most frequently confused letters associated with dyslexia are the lower case 'b' and 'd'. By giving these letterforms identities I hope to aid letterform recognition.

Conceptualising

I have been working on finalising my concept, I have identified a problem with existing educational toys aimed at dyslexic children, as the vast majority I have encountered are unappealing and  not engaging for young children. Many of the flash cards are printed on bright white paper stock which can cause difficulties for dyslexic people who are sensitive to the white/black contrast found in most books which hinders their ability to recognise written text. Another issue which i am aware of an wish to address is the negative attitudes young children develop towards books as a result of negative reading experiences. Whilst many dyslexic children can read relatively fluently (although at an impaired rate) and do enjoy stories, negative attitudes towards books develop due to classroom experiences and also through misguided parents who fail to understand the dyslexic child's slow reading rate. Children as a result grow to dread reading time or being asked to read out loud and therefore never venture to read books by themselves due to these negative associations.

It is my aim therefore to create a game which accommodates the dyslexic child's reading and learning style, which will aid their comprehension and reading skills and which will forge positive associations with books and reading. 

Buns for Sale

Phew its been a busy week! On tuesday myself, Danni, Tara and Ashliegh manned the bun sale stall and tempted/hassled/bullied passers by into buying the delicious baked goods which kind volunteers from our class had baked. The event was a huge success and we raised £216.60 which will go towards our final year show. I created some little baked good illustrations which we used for the signage and product labeling.