Following the Light
PNCA Illustration Thesis, Fall 2024
A picture book dummy that follows a little faerie over the course of one night.
The Abstract
“Following the Light” is a picture book that deals with the feelings of community, personal resilience, and queer identity. The story follows a small insect faerie named Moth. They are a mail courier with one last package to deliver who, upon getting distracted by a grove of glowing plant life, finds that they’ve lost their way in the surrounding forest without a light to guide them. Moth wanders until they find their way to another faerie’s door. They introduce themself as Firefly and offer to show Moth to their final destination in order to finish their delivery.
“Following the Light” is a 7x10”, 48 page, self ended picture book dummy intended for an audience of older children from the 4th to 6th grades. The entire book is brought to the rough sketch stage, toned in black and white. Two important spreads, as well as the cover, are finished entirely. The whole thing is compiled in a dummy ready for publisher consideration.
Thesis Oral
November, 2024
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I’m a story driven artist, always have been. I’ve loved reading ever since my mother taught me, from picture books by Jan Brett, to the magic tree house series and beyond, fiction and fantasy have played a pivotal role in my childhood. I was the type of kid to hide a flashlight under my pillow to read after my bedtime, and later on to sit in the back of the classroom, not listening, tearing through a new novel every few days. I wrote and illustrated my first story when I was six and have never really stopped. Even now, as I’ve made my way through college, all my work is attached to a story or a character, so it was kind of a no brainer to tap into that for my thesis, the culmination of my time here at PNCA.
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For the past five months, since I proposed this project last spring, I’ve been refining an idea that actually started a year and a half prior to that. I wrote a script in a comics class that was then illustrated by a classmate, and I later used the story again in a picture book class, but I still couldn’t get this story out of my head. It’s never felt finished, settled, until now. This, is “Following the Light”
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“Following the Light” is a picture book dummy intended for an audience of older children and pre-teens (ages 9-12). It’s 48 pages, self ended, and page is 7”x10” (14”x10” for a spread). I completed each spread digitally on a combination of Procreate (on the iPad) and Adobe InDesign.
Within the narrative, I’ve worked with unconventional character design and themes of queer identity, isolation, and personal resilience in order to explore humanizing the distinctly non-human. By having characters that are clearly not human and then humanizing them through their actions, I hope to inspire kids to look around them and do the same, even if someone doesn’t look the same as them, or use the same pronouns, or act in the same way. Pushing for a more understanding and united future through our younger generations is a cause we all have a stake in, especially considering the political climate we’re living through today.
"Following the Light" endpage 1, 2024
"Following the Light" endpage 2, 2024
As mentioned before, my ideal audience for “Following the Light” are preteens. Kids who are starting to figure out who they are and experimenting with being an individual with free will and an identity. I would like to help kids be more open and accepting of their peers, regardless of whether they look like them or not.
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To appeal to these kids, and to set work apart from the masses, I have pushed the character design of my faeries from the Disney-esque “human with wings” to something that combines insects and humanity a little more. It was my intent to design Moth and Firefly to appeal to older kids more than your typical human faerie design by skewing their design a little to the odd side. Like when kids get interested in and want to start watching horror movies. It’s not my intent for Moth and Firefly to be scary, though, just unusual enough to warrant curiosity.
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I also wanted to make this book appeal to kids who are already interested in the forest and adventures, so having my characters look different should intrigue the type of kids who would appreciate the story.
Additionally, with the goal being to “humanize the inhuman”, I think that it’s important to really emphasize the “inhuman” part of Moth and Firefly’s appearances. Firefly is, obviously, based off a firefly while Moth is, obviously, a moth, but specifically the Chickweed Geometer. They are more ephemeral spirits born from the idea of insects than actual flesh and blood, so I took creative liberty for their designs and blurred the lines between “clothes” and exoskeletons. For both of them, I pulled color schemes from their real life counterparts.
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For Firefly, I pulled inspiration from the beetle like carapace and gave them more geometric, armor-like shapes, and chose to use more square shapes to emphasize their stability and dependability. I also chose to hook their hair in at the jaw to allude to the mandibles real fireflies have.
For Moth, meanwhile, I wanted to highlight their approachable, bubbly, sort of airheaded personality, so I kept most of their design very round. I used this opportunity to give them lots of fluff to allude to the hairs that moths have on their thorax and abdomen.
"Following the Light" Thumbnails V1, 2024
"Following the Light" Thumbnails V6, 2024
I ended up making the decision to keep my toning the way it was on these pages in order to keep the feeling consistent throughout the dummy, though. I feel like keeping the very dark, void like pages as they are is the best representation of how the finished pieces would come across.
It’s at this point where I deviated from the plan I proposed in the spring. Originally, I was going to take these sketches out of the computer and complete the majority of the finished artwork physically with ink and watercolor, before polishing them up digitally once again. I was looking for the soft, tactile feeling that textured paper and watercolor bring to pieces. In practice, however, I wasn’t able to get the effect I wanted in conjunction with the intense focus on light I was going for.
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Because the lighting effects were integral to telling the story, I made the decision to skip the physical media and did the entire thing digitally. It’s the media I am most comfortable with. I knew that I would be able to produce work that fulfilled the expectations I have for myself more than if I were to continue with my preestablished plan. That being said, I do believe I was able to retain much of the mark making and texture that is indicative of traditional media in my finished pieces.
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To conclude my process, I compiled all the spreads and used Adobe InDesign to format the images and text to create a cohesive book dummy.
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This process, spanning for about five months now, has been my longest project to date. Before now, everything I’ve done has been in the context of either a school project, or instant personal gratification. It was both more and less challenging than I would have thought, overall. I really enjoyed allowing myself to focus and dedicate so much time to Moth and their story.
Usually, when I get super excited about a particular story or a specific character, I spend a lot of time right off the bat thinking about or creating content for them, then burn the idea out and move on to the next. It was a real challenge for me to pace myself through the summer and this semester in such a way that I remained interested and invested, but not manic about it. That being said, once I got a rhythm going, I found myself really enjoying the process, even during the stages that I usually find tedious - like thumbnailing over and over again, or doing infinitesimally small tweaks at the very end.
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It’s because of this that I am super excited to keep working with Moth and Firefly in the future! I want to use this dummy to begin correspondence with a variety of publishing representatives in an effort to not only publish this picture book officially, but to establish myself and the type of stories I wish to tell going forward with my illustration career.
The far-right conservative extremists under Trump have won the most recent presidential and congressional races on a platform of hateful intolerance and exclusionionary ideology. Everyone is affected by this capitalization on “us vs them” division, no matter their race, gender expression, sexual orientation, economic station, or political alignment. Now, just as it always has been and always will be, is a time for communities to come together, trust in themselves and in each other, and to not only survive but thrive. Exclusionary practices and ideological violence has never in human history promoted healthy, long lasting cultures. Communities and civilizations are built through diversity - mind, body, and soul - and it is this acceptance and celebration of people’s differences I would like to highlight in “Following the Light”.
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As a member of the queer community, growing up I rarely saw people in my books, or movies, or tv shows who were like me. (A common experience.) And even as I made my way through high school, the only queer media I was able to find were stories about being gay (specifically), or in which being gay (specifically) was a major point of contention and conflict. It was all media that sought to make homosexuality (of the male variety, specifically) palatable to an overwhelmingly heteronormative and cisgendered culture.
Don’t get me wrong, stories like these do have their place in queer media. They talk about things that are very important to the community and do a very good job providing overt, in your face representation. In fact, some of these books are among my favorites. I just think that there is a lack of other queer stories being told.
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In my artistic and writing practice, I want to share stories about queer characters (not just gay ones) without that queerness being challenged or sensationalized. Just stories about people like me doing the things I wanted to do as a kid, like being a faerie and living in a mushroom house.
I want to provide children stories with characters that clearly and unapologetically represent them in all their various gender expressions without it being a big deal. The characters I wish to portray aren’t important or interesting because they are queer, they are simply important and interesting (and queer, ya know, on the side).
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In the spirit of normalizing queer identities, in the world of “Following the Light'' none of the faeries are gendered, and their character designs draw from both sides of the gendered spectrum in. Additionally, I have used the gender neutral pronoun “they” to refer to the fairies whenever applicable. In this way, I hope to create a more androgynous presentation that children can relate to in some way, no matter where their own personal feelings lay.
I’ve mixed this theme with the forest culture we have here in Portland and the greater Pacific Northwest. We have a community here who really enjoys the nature that surrounds us, and that appreciation is what I want to show in my work and the stories I tell.
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Finally, and most obviously, is the light. Over the course of the book, Moth is drawn through the world as they follow different light sources, finding new ones as the previous lights disappear. It’s this faith in themself and their personal ideology that allows Moth to eventually accomplish their original mission. Through this plot line, the importance of finding a support system that understands and works with you is explored.
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I chose to present this story in the form of a picture book because picture books for older children are few and far between. It was an area I lacked when I was a pre-teen, so not only were illustrated novels like Wildwood, and Fairy Dust and the Quest for the Egg very special to me, but so were the few actual picture books. I have core memories of adoring books like Sitka Rose and Jan Brett’s entire series not only for the stories told, but also for the illustrations.
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All this is to say, this project is important to me because it’s a culmination of everything I have lived. I’m making this book for the kid I was when I was little.
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My process for this project followed a fairly typical flow.
Since the idea already existed, after my thesis proposal got approved last spring, I started to draft the script I would use, as well as re-design Moth and Firefly, over the summer.
"Following the Light" character designs, 2024
When I was doing this, I looked at the work of a variety of illustrators, but the work of Velinxi and David Christiana influenced me the most. When I was working on the design for Moth and Firefly, I took inspiration from Velinxi for the shape design of their characters and how they contrast sharp/soft corners and straight/curved lines.
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I grew up with David Christiana’s illustrations in my Disney faerie books, and his watercolor style was what originally inspired me to start working with watercolor textures. Watercolor has been a staple for picture books throughout history due to softness being popular with children, so I wanted to bring that familiarity into “Following the Light” as I was pushing so many other boundaries.
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I decided I wanted “Following the Light” to fill the same niche that Wildwood, Dragon in the Sock Drawer, or The Secret Life of Arrietty filled in their respective media. They each have the cozy, homey, backyard adventure vibe that I was striving to emulate, but in the format of a picture book. I’d like to imagine “Following the Light” to someday sit on the same shelves as books by Julia Sarda, Carson Ellis, and John Classen & Mac Barnett.
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The last thing I did, right before the semester started this fall, was to very roughly thumbnail the book out digitally. From there, the book went through many rounds of revisions, focusing mostly on pacing. Parts of the book - the parts that have gone though the most revisions - remained very rough thumbnails as I worked the spreads that I was most confident about up through the sketching and toning stages.
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Generally, in other instances, I do sketching and toning in separate steps, but because light is such an integral part of the story, I found it difficult to separate the tones from the sketches, so I ended up doing both the sketching and toning simultaneously.
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An interesting note about this process - if you’d notice, most of the values in the spreads aren’t actually toned in the traditional sense. The values you see are actually just my rough depiction of how light would fall in the final pieces. It’s something that I hadn’t realized I was doing until it was pointed out to me rather late in the process. A comment was made that I should look at including tones in the pages wherein Moth doesn’t have any light to guide them. Traditionally, toning is used to pick out large shapes from each other - the characters from the background, for instance.
"Following the Light" page 18-19, 2024
"Following the Light" page 40-41, 2024