The Final Book

The final book ended up being 5"x7" with over 60 pages. Each page was written and drawn by hand with ink and markers. Then the pages were touched up on Photoshop. Here are some of my favorite spreads and below is the process of making the book.

Background

My senior project where I created a book of dreams during the first year of the pandemic from multiple different sources. I created a book containing dreams people had mainly during the first year of the pandemic. These dreams were taken from multiple sources, such as books, websites, and Twitter hashtags. I have earned permission to use their source for this project and for my portfolio.

Research

This is a spreadsheet I created for every dream I came across and separated them by source. Each dream is on one cell and each dream is color-coded with a category. This made it easy for me to track down the original source of the dream when I had to create a credits page. Not every dream on the spreadsheet were used in the final project.

Dummy Books

At first, I created dummy books for each category. The original idea was to create a full book with different chapters for each category. Then I got a suggestion to have the categories it's own booklet and reside in a slipcase. However, I decided against it due to each category having varying levels of quality and length.

Creating the Content

I drew and wrote the pages by hand and touched it up in Photoshop. Many of the pages were cut from the final because it had more text. I felt it was more effective with having the dreams with smaller text. The pages were made using ink and Copic markers.

​Book Cover Sketches

I created 2 versions for each sketch: one with text and the other textless.

Cover

The feedback I received favored the cover with the sheep because of the juxtaposition of a calming cover, with the dark content. I was told to integrate the text with the illustration so it doesn't stand out. The change I've made was to make the moon bigger with the title written on it. I put in a shadow that vaguely looked like a virus, and gave the sheep face masks. The final cover was done with ink and watercolor.