Tuesday homework

We'll start on our "book illustration" project next class. For this project, you'll have six pages in a book (set us as three two-page spreads), in which to lay out and illustrate a short story or a poem.

WHAT'S IMMEDIATELY DUE TUESDAY:
1. Pick your story or poem (see below for more details)
2. Bring in a page from a magazine, newspaper, or picture book that you think balances the imagery and text very effectively. I want you to bring the book/page into class, to show to the class as an example of a good text/image balance.

For the story/poem, you have the choice of:

1. Choosing something you've written, or that a friend of your has written (as long as the friend gives you permission)
2. Choosing something written by an SNC student who has submitted the story for this purpose (see link below)
3. Choosing something in the public domain

Since we are more or less "publishing" this story through lulu.com, I want to the content (and the images) to be legit – no pilfering copyrighted material.

In terms of illustrating the story, you are free to use drawings you make, photographs you take, or any stock imagery you are able to download for free or pay for.

By Tuesday's class, I want you to have a story or poem chosen, with some ideas of how you'll illustrate it. I want you to be adventurous in your layout, but legibility of the content itself will be key.

I also want you to talk about a layout strategy you like in one of the books I provided for the class to look through – and also, I want you to bring in a book or magazine that has some interesting layout strategies, for you to present to the class on Tuesday. I just want us to pool our resources so that we have a lot of approaches/strategies to riff on.

Here are links to a variety of public domain resources. If the story you'd like will take longer than six pages to tell, feel free to use an excerpt of the story.

Philip K. Dick stories (science fiction from the 50s and 60s)
Classic Short Stories
Short Stories from the Internet Archive
Literary Stories
Horror stories:
H. P. Lovecraft
Algernon Blackwood
Edgar Allen Poe
Public Domain Poetry


Just make sure you claim it in the comments to this blog post, so we don't have a bunch of people illustrating the same story. In fact, ONCE YOU'VE CHOSEN THE STORY YOU WANT TO ILLUSTRATE, WRITE THE NAME OF THE STORY IN THE COMMENTS TO THIS BLOG POST, checking that no one else has taken it first, so that we don't have any repeats in terms of story/poem selections.